A crew of four astronauts landed early Tuesday morning off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico upon returning to Earth after a mission of more than six months on the International Space Station (ISS).
The crew, aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, landed off the coast of Pensacola at 5:47 a.m. local time (09:47 GMT), after a NASA thermal camera showed that the capsule's four brake parachutes were were deployed.
Led by American astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, who was making her first trip to space, NASA's
“Crew-7”
mission joined the ISS at the end of August aboard the same capsule that brought it back to Earth.
The mission also included the Dane Andreas Mogensen, the Japanese Satoshi Furukawa and the Russian cosmonaut Konstantin Borissov.
After an 18.5 hour journey from the ISS, the capsule was recovered at 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 still in progress between the two countries.
International scientific cooperation
In a speech departing from the ISS on Sunday, Jasmin Moghbeli praised the international cooperation which made it possible, after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, to set up the ISS.
“It’s proof of what is possible when we work together
,” she said.
During the six months spent in space, the crew carried out scientific work, for example studying how microgravity, which accelerates aging, affects liver regeneration.
This is the seventh regular crew rotation mission carried out by SpaceX, the company of billionaire Elon Musk, for NASA.
“Crew-8”
, which took over, arrived on March 5 on the ISS.
NASA pays SpaceX for this service, which has reduced dependence on Russia to take crews to the International Space Station since the end of American space shuttle flights in 2011.