After a six-month stay in orbit in the International Space Station, Thomas Pesquet is on Earth… well, more precisely at sea. The French astronaut's second space mission ended in the night of Monday to Tuesday by a successful landing off the coast of Florida.

SpaceX's Dragon capsule was slowed down in its dizzying descent by the Earth's atmosphere and then by huge parachutes.

It was 4:33 am in Paris when she landed in the Gulf of Mexico.

The capsule must be retrieved quickly by a ship stationed nearby.

200 days in zero gravity

Arriving aboard the space station on April 24, the 43-year-old astronaut spent some 200 days in zero gravity. “We are proud to have represented France once again in space! “, Tweeted a few hours before departure the one who, through his abundant publications on social networks, offered millions of people a taste of life in orbit. "Next time, the Moon?" », He had launched.

Thomas Pesquet, however, did not return alone. In the capsule, he was with the other members of the Crew-2 mission: the Japanese Akihiko Hoshide and the Americans Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur. Elon Musk's company ship also carried 240 kg of science equipment and experiments. The descent to Earth proper lasted about eight and a half hours in total. The landing was also 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 "for many months," he said Friday at a press conference.

"I even have the impression that it's been years," he added, qualifying the past mission as "very, very intense".

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Astronaut Thomas Pesquet has left the International Space Station

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How will Thomas Pesquet's return to Earth unfold?

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