A crew of four astronauts landed Tuesday morning off the US state of Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico, returning to Earth after a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS), reports AFP.
Astronauts on the International Space Station PHOTO nasa X
The crew, aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, landed off the coast of Pensacola at 05:47 local time (09:47 GMT), after a thermal camera from the US space agency NASA showed that all four parachutes capsule brakes have opened.
Led by American astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, who made her first trip to space, NASA's Crew-7 mission arrived at the ISS at the end of August, in the same capsule with which it returned to Earth.
The mission also included the Dane Andreas Mogensen, the Japanese Satoshi Furukawa and the Russian cosmonaut Konstantin Borissov. After an 18-and-a-half-hour journey from the ISS, the capsule was retrieved from the sea in less than half an hour.
Despite diplomatic tensions between Washington and Moscow since the start of the war in Ukraine, collaboration between the American and Russian space agencies continues on the ISS – one of the few areas of cooperation that has been maintained between the two states.
In her departure speech aboard the ISS on Sunday, astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli praised the international cooperation that enabled the ISS to be established after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s.It is proof of what we can achieve when we work togethershe said.
During the six months spent in space, the crew carried out various scientific activities, studying, for example, how microgravity, which accelerates aging, affects liver regeneration.
This is the seventh mission in the regular crew rotation on the ISS carried out for NASA by billionaire Elon Musk's company SpaceX. The eighth crew, which took over the mission from SpaceX, arrived at the ISS on March 5.
NASA pays SpaceX for this service, which has allowed it to reduce its reliance on Russia and send crews to the International Space Station after the US space shuttle program ended in 2011.
