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Four astronauts boarded a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and returned home from the International Space Station on Friday, ending their nearly six-month stay aboard the orbiting laboratory.
The astronauts, NASA’s Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins, as well as Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency, or ESA, shared goodbye hugs with fellow astronauts on the space station and strapped into their spacecraft around 10 a.m. ET.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft left its docking port on the ISS around noon ET and made a gradual journey home toward the edge of Earth’s thick inner atmosphere. The capsule then fired its thrusters again to orient itself as it began its re-entry. This step began to slow the spacecraft from its orbital speed of about 17,500 miles per hour (28,164 kilometers per hour). A heat shield kept the astronauts protected as the fiery dive toward Earth heated the exterior of the spacecraft to more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius).
A column of parachutes then further slowed its descent before landing off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, just before 5 pm ET. Rescue ships waited nearby and lifted the spacecraft out of the water, allowing astronauts to exit the capsule and take their first breaths of fresh air in about 170 days.
This mission, called Crew-4, marked a historic first, with Watkins becoming the first black woman to join the space station crew for an extended stay.
During their stay, the astronauts conducted scientific experiments, including research on how to grow vegetables in space without soil and studying the effects of space flight on the human body.
Those experiments are designed to help astronauts understand how they might one day grow their own food and how their bodies might react on missions deeper into space, such as NASA’s planned Artemis lunar missions, Watkins said during a briefing. press last week.
“It’s been amazing to be able to get into the Columbus module and smell the scent of leaves growing, plants growing,” Watkins told reporters.
Cristoforetti, who was on a previous mission to the space station in 2014-2015, is the only woman in ESA’s astronaut corps and made her own story on this mission. Last month, she took over as space station commander, becoming the first European woman to do so.
Cristoforetti also conducted a spacewalk in July to deploy small satellites and work on installing a new robotic arm outside the space station.
