Time.news – After six months in orbit, the spacecraft’s astronauts Crew Dragon di SpaceX they are returning to Earth. Ditching is scheduled for the Italian night.
I four astronauts (the two Americans from NASA, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, the Japanese Akihiko Hoshide, of the Jaza Space Agency, and the French Thomas Pesquet, of the European Space Agency) have begun the process of separation from the International Space Station (ISS ) at 8:05 pm and then began the perilous journey back to Earth.
Watch Dragon depart the @space_station and return to Earth with Crew-2 astronauts → https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK https://t.co/5Pb3CtfIAU
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 8, 2021
A journey that will last several hours, but after re-entering the atmosphere, the spacecraft will make a dizzying descent before landing off the coast of Florida, at Italian dawn, no earlier than 04:33 am. Also aboard are 240 kg of scientific equipment and experiments, which Crew-2’s four astronauts studied for six months.
Crew-2 is the second of six manned missions to and from the ISS that the company of Elon Musk fielded as part of the contract with NASA which provides for the dispatch of astronauts from US soil, missions that had not been carried out since the end of the Shuttle program in 2011.
Sunrise in space @SpaceX‘s Crew Dragon Endeavour passes over the east coast of Japan as it enters the final leg of its loop around the @Space_Station: pic.twitter.com/Xb8s0Je1Mr
– NASA (@NASA) November 8, 2021
The Nasa maintains unchanged for now the plan to launch the Crew-3 mission from Kennedy Space Center, also in Florida, on Wednesday. The new mission will bring four other astronauts aboard a new Dragon capsule to the orbital laboratory: Commander Raja Chari, pilot Tom Marshburn, NASA mission specialist Kayla Barron and German ESA scientist Matthias Maurer. And they too will stay in space for another six months.
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