NASA’s live broadcast showed that after six months of busy work on the International Space Station, the SpaceX capsule carrying four astronauts landed near the Florida coast on Monday. Due to the deceleration of the Earth’s atmosphere and four huge parachutes, the Dragon capsule can withstand a dizzying descent with its heat shield.
It landed in the Gulf of Mexico at 10:33 PM Eastern Time (09:03 AM IST Tuesday), marking the end of the “Crew-2” mission. A ship will retrieve the space capsule, and the astronauts on the ship will be taken away by helicopter to return to land. Since arriving on April 24, two Americans, a Frenchman, and a Japanese astronaut have conducted hundreds of experiments and helped upgrade the space station’s solar panels. They boarded the Dragon, known as “Endeavour,” and separated from the International Space Station at 2:05 pm (12:35 am US Standard Time), NASA announced.
Then Endeavour circled the International Space Station for about an hour and a half to take pictures, which was the first such mission since the Russian Soyuz spacecraft conducted a similar maneuver in 2018. Most of the “Dragon” flight is autonomous, and there is a small circular window on the top of its front hatch through which astronauts can point to their cameras. “It’s an honor to enter space on behalf of France again! Next stop, the moon?” Thomas Pesquet from the European Space Agency (ESA) tweeted.
Their activities include recording the earth’s surface to record man-made changes and natural events, planting hachi peppers, and studying worms to better understand human health changes in space. The takeoff of Crew-2 was delayed by strong winds by one day. Bad weather and what NASA called “minor medical problems” also delayed the launch of the next astronauts, the Crew-3 mission, which is now scheduled to launch on Wednesday. Before that, the International Space Station will have only three astronauts-two Russians and one American. SpaceX began to provide astronauts with taxi services to the International Space Station in 2020, ending the United States’ dependence on Russian rockets for nine years after the end of the space shuttle program.
Broken toilet
The crew also faced the last challenge on the journey home-after detecting a problem with the capsule’s waste management system, they had to wear diapers, forcing it to stay offline. From 12:40 in the evening (11:40 a.m. on Tuesday, U.S. Standard Time), the hatches were closed until water splashed-for about 10 hours, they could not go to the toilet. “Of course, this is sub-optimal, but we are ready to deal with it,” NASA astronaut Megan MacArthur said at a press conference before departure.
“Space flight is full of many small challenges, this is just another challenge we will encounter and deal with in the mission.” SpaceX’s all-tourism crew encountered a similar garbage-related issue during a September flight, which triggered an alert system. NASA later stated that a tube had been degummed and sent urine into the capsule’s fan system instead of the storage tank.
News Source : Gadgets 360
