Frenchman Thomas Pesquet returned to Earth overnight from Monday to Tuesday, after a six-month stay in orbit on the International Space Station.
In the region of New Orleans in the United States and as far as Mexico, many people have witnessed the return of the Crew Dragon capsule, filming it with their smartphones from their garden or their window. Passing like a comet in the sky, the craft crossed the American sky for several tens of seconds before landing successfully off the coast. For the astronauts, the trip from the International Space Station will have taken about eight and a half hours in total.
The landing was a first for Thomas Pesquet.
During his previous mission in 2016-2017, he landed in the Kazakh steppes with a Russian Soyuz.
For three weeks, the French astronaut will be subjected to a battery of scientific tests, intended to observe the effect of a long stay in orbit on the human body.
This will not prevent him from seeing his relatives.
Then the French hero will finally take a little vacation.
The first "for many months," he said Friday at a press conference.
"I even have the impression that it's been years" by qualifying the past mission as "very, very intense".
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"The Moon, that's one of the possibilities"
During his stay in orbit, Thomas Pesquet made no less than four extra-vehicular outings (“EVA”) outside the station, in particular to install new solar panels.
This brings him to six sorties in total, after the two made during his first mission.
He is the French astronaut who has spent the most time in space.