French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and his team return to Earth after a successful landing

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, when he left Earth on April 23, 2021, in Florida.

(illustrative image) AP - John Raoux

Text by: RFI Follow

3 min

Thus ends the second space mission of his career: the Frenchman Thomas Pesquet returned to Earth on the night of Monday 8 to Tuesday 9 November, after a six-month stay in orbit in the International Space Station.

The adventure ended with a successful landing aboard a SpaceX spacecraft off the coast of Florida, in particular with three other astronauts and 240 kg of material from scientific experiments.

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SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which also carried three other astronauts, was slowed down in its dizzying descent by the Earth's atmosphere and then by huge parachutes.

She landed in the Gulf of Mexico at 3:33 a.m. UT (4:33 a.m. Paris time) on Tuesday, at dawn in France, and was to be recovered quickly by a ship stationed nearby.

The 43-year-old astronaut spent some 200 days in zero gravity.

“We are 

 “, Tweeted a few hours before departure the one who

, offered millions of people a taste of life in orbit.

" 

 », He had launched.

Thomas Pesquet returned with the other members of the Crew-2 mission - Japanese Akihiko Hoshide and Americans Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur.

They had arrived aboard the space station (ISS) on April 24.

Elon Musk's company ship also carried 240 kg of science equipment and experiments.

The journey to Earth was made in several stages.

The capsule was first undocked at 7:05 p.m. UT (8:05 p.m. Paris time).

Then Dragon circled the Space Station for about an hour and a half to photograph the exterior.

On the live video broadcast from NASA, we could then see Thomas Pesquet having removed his suit, taking these photos through a window.

The descent to Earth proper then began, with the trip taking about eight and a half hours in total.

A little vacation

The landing was 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 was recovered and the astronauts exited, a helicopter was to bring them back to dry land.

They will then take a plane to the NASA Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Thomas Pesquet will undergo quick medical tests there before flying to Cologne, Germany, where the European Astronaut Center is located.

For three weeks, it will then be subjected to a battery of scientific tests, intended to observe the effect of a long stay in orbit on the human body.

This will not prevent him from seeing his relatives.

Then the astronaut will finally take a little vacation.

The first " 

 " he said Friday at a press conference.

" 

 " he added, qualifying the past mission as " 

 ".

► 

During his stay in orbit, Thomas Pesquet made no less than four extra-vehicular outings (“EVA”) outside the station, in particular to install new solar panels.

This brings him to six sorties in total, after the two made during his first mission.

He also conducted many scientific experiments.

Crew-2 is the second regular mission carried out by SpaceX on behalf of NASA.

The company allowed the space agency to resume flights from American soil, after the shutdown of the space shuttles in 2011.

The crew of Crew-2 returns to Earth before the arrival on board the ISS of their replacements, four astronauts from Crew-3, whose take-off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has been repeatedly delayed, especially because of the weather.

It will finally take place on Wednesday at 9:03 p.m. local time (02:03 GMT, or 03:03 Paris time Thursday, November 11) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

With AFP

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