SpaceX e Nasa they reported successfully landed the astronauts that they had been on International Space Station for six monthsthe. The spaceship Crew Dragon in fact she successfully ditched, supported by 4 parachutes, with on board three American astronauts and one Japanese, Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker of NASA and the Japanese Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
The NASA video on the spacecraft’s reentry and ditching Crew Dragon
The ditching, after 160 days in space, took place in front of coste di Panama City, in Florida, and was broadcast live by the Nasa with jaw-dropping images. The four astronauts had been the first on an “operational” mission to be transported ona Iss from Elon Musk’s space company, the billionaire visionary who has become a defining partner of NASA.
Two other Americans had already made the round trip aboard Dragon in 2020, but it had been a test mission of just two months, the first flight to the ISS launched by the United States since the end of the missions of the Space Shuttle, in 2011, and the first made by a private company with astronauts on board.
This is the first regular mission to be transported to Earth by SpaceX. For the return to earth, the astronauts used the same Dragon spaceship, dubbed “Resilience”, which took them into orbit and which SpaceX plans to reuse for other missions, after having reconditioned it. Disengaged from the Harmony module of the Space Station, the spacecraft – which is called Resilience and has an internal space of 9 square meters – also brought back to Earth the result of the various experiments conducted on board the ISS: a load of 250 kg of material .
The cargo is stored in the pressurized section, in safety cabinets that are refrigerated freezers. The return of this crew, Crew-1, takes place after the arrival on board the ISS, last week, of a second regular mission, Crew-2, also carried out by the American company.
The return to the atmosphere of the shuttle was not a walk. The shuttle and the four astronauts on board had to return to Earth undergo a real stress test which is always a very delicate phase of space missions. It is a series of physical effects related to great speed – estimated at around 27,000 kilometers per hour, twenty times the speed of sound – with which the spacecraft begins to approach the earth’s atmosphere during the descent phases.
(Continued: the description of the return …)