The French ended Monday its second mission aboard the ISS. The Dragon capsule, along which he travels, should ditch the night off Florida.
Le Monde with AFP
The second attempt has been good. After an initial postponement of the return journey to Earth because of bad weather, the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and three of his teammates left, Monday, November 8th, the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a ship meant ditching off Florida at night.
The 43-year astronaut arrived at the end of April to the ISS, spent some two hundred days – about six months – in orbit for its second mission in space. “Feeling bitter sweet to the idea of leaving the ISS. When you think about it, it really is a magical, almost impossible to achieve and that gives you superpowers like flying, or go around the world in 1 hour 30 … It looks still a bit in a daydream … “ told on Twitter one who by his abundant publications on social networks, offered to millions of people a glimpse of life in orbit.
Other members of the mission Crew-2, Japan’s Akihiko Hoshide and Americans Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur also travel aboard the Dragon capsule of the space firm SpaceX. They take with them 240 kilograms of equipment and science experiments.
Three weeks of medical tests
After entering the atmosphere, the spacecraft will perform a dizzying descent before landing off the coast of Florida, a priori Tuesday, November 9 to 4 pm 30 am Paris time. The landing, which promises intense shaking, is a first for the French astronaut. At its previous mission, in 2016-2017, he had landed in the Kazakh steppe aboard a Russian Soyuz.
This should “be a little softer on the water,” said Thomas Pesquet. “Then what can happen is that it moves a little.” “We already have a little seasick on the way to Earth, so there, returning to the sea, it may be even worse, but we’ll see, “he added. Once the capsule has “entered” the surface of the sea (splashdown in English), it will float, and the crew will be recovered faster by ships positioned nearby.
A helicopter will bring the Crew-2 on land, where they will take a plane to the Space Center of NASA in Houston, Texas. Thomas Pesquet undergo rapid medical testing there before flying to Cologne, Germany, where the European Astronaut Center.
For three weeks, there will follow a “fitness intense program,” and will be subject to the same tests before and during his stay in weightlessness, to contribute to the collection of scientific data on the effects on the human body an extended stay in orbit. His family however will see. “And then I hope, first week of vacation for many months,” he said Friday. “I even feel like it’s been years.” Chronicling the past six months, he described the mission as “very, very intense.”
SpaceX selected by NASA
Crew-2 is the second regular task performed by SpaceX, the company Elon Musk, on behalf of NASA – a partnership recurring since the US space agency also chose SpaceX for the next trip on Moon. The company has enabled NASA to resume flights from American soil, after stopping space shuttles in 2011.
Substitute Thomas Pesquet and colleagues – Americans Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn and German Matthias Maurer, called Crew-3 – expected from Earth on Wednesday 21 pm 30 hour Florida (3 h 30 Paris time on Thursday). This however is not a certainty their departure has been delayed several times, mainly because of the weather