Welcome back! NASA -astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are finally at home. They spent nine months circling on the ground at the International Space Station. Long-term ISS missions are not unusual, except these particular astronauts did not plan an extended stay.
Williams and Wilmore rode to the station on a crew Boeing Starliner Test Mission in June. The herd capsule encountered technical problems and was sent back to Earth without the astronauts. Their eight-day stay was one month long stay. The couple lifted a trip back on a SpaceX Dragon room vessel. The capsule made a picture-perfect splash out of the coast of Tallahasee, Florida on Tuesday afternoon.
SpaceX Dragon Freedom Spacecraft is seen after it sprayed down the coast of Tallahasee, Florida, Tuesday and returned crew-9 to the ground.
Crew-9 make successful splashdown
Crew-9’s SpaceX Dragon space vessel is called Freedom. Dragon’s parachutes gently lowered the capsule into the quiet water after a fiery reinstatement process, with temperatures reaching up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. A SpaceX Recovery ship is tasked with bringing the capsule on board. The crew will catch a helicopter back to land.
NASA’s live coverage of the return started at 1 p.m. 16.45 one, with Splashdown, which occurred at about 1 p.m. 17.57 NASA planned a Return-to-Earth Media Conference until 1 p.m. 19.30 Watch on the NASA app, on Streaming Service NASA Plus or on YouTube.
Crew-9 for rescue
Crew-9 was launched in late September with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos Cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov on board. NASA reserved two empty seats for Williams and Wilmore to get home.
Both Williams and Wilmore have insisted that they did not feel stranded, though this expression has been widely applied to them in news stories and social media.
“Butch and Suni have each completed two stays on the long -term aboard the station,” Nasa said in an explanatory. “NASA astronauts are embarking on missions that are fully aware of the different scenarios that can become reality.”
The astronauts integrated with the existing herd, kept busy with research and even went on a space walk together in January.
SpaceX Dragon space vessel with four crew on board departs the International Space Station.
Crew-10 transfer
The Crew-10 had a little more riding on it than a typical herd rotation mission. The crew-10 delivery cleared crew-9 for its long-awaited return to the ground.
The three astronauts and a cosmonaut of the SpaceX Crew-10 Mission docked with the International Space Station just after midnight on a Sunday, and at 01:35 the hatches between Space Dragon spaces and ISS opened the meeting with the crew already there.
NASA -Astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos Cosmonaut Kirill Peskov were welcomed by Expedition 72 crew, including Williams, Wilmore and Hague, Nasa Astronaut Don Petitt and Roscosmos Cosonauts Gorble Ovchinine and Ivan Vagner. It provided a crowded house at the space station until crew-9 left.
Crew-9’s return marks the end of a space saga that has fascinated the public. It is a complex story involving Boeing’s Starliner -Fonde, SpaceX’s dominance in human aerospace and the apparent situation of two space travelers who couldn’t come home.
Williams and Wilmore set many years of training to spend time in space on this mission. It ended up being much more time than they expected.