After six months in orbit, the Frenchman Thomas Pesquet left, with three other astronauts – the Japanese Akihiko Hoshide and the Americans Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur -, the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the SpaceX capsule, this Monday evening , starting a journey back to Earth lasting several hours, NASA said.
The undocking of the Dragon capsule took place at the scheduled time, 19:05 GMT (20:05 Paris time). It will now begin a journey of several hours, which will begin with an unusual maneuver: it will tour the Space Station in order to photograph it, thus providing invaluable information to NASA teams on its external equipment.
Scientific equipment and experiments
The vessel will then make a dizzying descent, slowed down by its entry into the atmosphere and then by huge parachutes, before landing off Florida, a priori at 03:33 GMT Tuesday (4:33 a.m. Paris time), i.e. dawn in France. The landing, which promises to be intense, is a first for the French astronaut. During his previous mission in 2016-2017, he landed in the Kazakh steppes with a Russian Soyuz.
Once the capsule has “hit” the surface of the sea (“splashdown” in English), it will float, and the crew will be recovered as quickly as possible by ships positioned nearby which will bring them back to dry land. On board Elon Musk’s company ship are also 240 kg of scientific equipment and experiments, which the four astronauts have been examining aboard this flying laboratory.