Four Crew-5 members aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule called Endurance successfully landed off the Gulf Coast in Florida on Saturday. Despite a slight delay due to bad weather conditions in the landing zone, the astronauts returned unharmed after a five-month scientific mission to the International Space Station.
The return trip lasted about 19 hours. The capsule entered the Earth’s atmosphere, deployed parachutes to extinguish the descent speed to 24 km/h, and gently parachuted off the coast of Tampa. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk celebrated their return by congratulating them on Twitter.
Yay!! https://t.co/6vdGdJUEC3
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 12, 2023
Among the team members were NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, as well as Japanese Koichi Wakata and Russian Anna Kikina. The SpaceX Crew-5 mission was the first flight into space for Mann, Kassada and Kikina. Wakata, Japan’s space flight champion, has spent more than 500 days in space over five missions dating back to NASA’s Space Shuttle era.
During their stay in orbit, the Crew-5 astronauts completed 2,512 orbits around the Earth upon arrival at the space station last October. During this time, they conducted many experiments, and also experienced several dangerous situations: avoidance of space debris and accidents on Russian spacecraft, because of which a rescue mission was equipped.
Now there are three Americans, three Russians and one astronaut from the United Arab Emirates left on the International Space Station.
Earlier we reported how an astronaut made an “unreal” image of the aurora from the ISS.
According to Interesting Engineering.
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