California: Four astronaut return to Earth on Monday, November 8, 2021 by plane SpaceX. They had previously spent six months on the International Space Station (ISS).
SpaceX is an American aerospace company founded by 50-year-old successful entrepreneur Elon Musk in 2002. SpaceX is headquartered in Hawthorne, California, USA.
Reported from AFP, Tuesday, November 9, 2021, the international crew conducted thousands of experiments in orbit and helped upgrade the solar panels on the ISS during their ‘Crew-2’ mission.
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The plane descended and was slowed by four large parachutes. Their Dragon spacecraft dubbed ‘Endeavour’ landed in the Gulf of Mexico at 22:33 local time, before being lifted onto the recovery ship.
Astronauts from the US Space Agency (NASA), Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, Japan’s Akihiko Hoshide, and France’s Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency (ESA) were removed from the capsule and placed on a stretcher as a precaution.
The human body is known to require a re-adjustment of gravity, after a long time in a vacuum. “It’s great to be back on Planet Earth,” Kimbrough said in a NASA live broadcast, after Dragon landed.
The ISS activities of Crew-2 astronauts include documenting the Earth’s surface to record human-caused changes and natural events, planting chili peppers, and studying worms to better understand changes in human health in space.
“Proud to represent France once again in space! Next stop, Moon?,” Pesquet tweeted in the post Twitter, before the trip home.
Their return to Earth adventure begins when Endeavor takes off from the ISS at 2:05 p.m. local time. Then, it circled around the ISS for an hour and a half to take photos, the first mission since the Russian Soyuz carried out a similar maneuver in 2018.
The Dragon, which flies mostly autonomously, has a small circular window at the top of the front hatch through which astronauts can point their cameras. Departure was called delayed a day due to strong winds.
Bad weather and what NASA has called a “minor medical problem” have also delayed the departure of the next set of astronauts, on the Crew-3 mission, due for launch on Wednesday. Until then, the ISS will only be manned by three astronauts, two Russians and one American.
Since 2020, SpaceX has started providing taxi services to astronauts to the ISS, ending nine years of US dependence on Russian rockets for travel following the end of the space shuttle program.
The crew is known to face a final challenge on the way home. They were required to wear diapers after a problem with the ship’s waste management system was detected and forced to remain offline.
From the time the hatch closed at 12:40 p.m. until after landing about 10 hours local time, the astronauts had no access to a small drain.
“Of course it is less than optimal, but we are ready to manage it. Spaceflight is full of many small challenges, this is just one more that we will face and complete in our mission,” McArthur explained during his pre-departure press conference.
SpaceX’s tourist crew encountered a similar waste-related problem during a flight last September, which triggered a notification or alarm system. Then, NASA stated, a tube had detached and sent urine into the capsule’s fan system, instead of a storage tank. (Nadia Ayu Soraya)
(FJR)
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