After six months in orbit, Thomas Pesquet will begin his return to Earth

After six months in orbit, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and his three teammates on the International Space Station are due to begin their return to Earth on Monday, a perilous journey aboard a spacecraft supposed to land off Florida.

The 43-year-old astronaut spent some 200 days in orbit on his second space mission.

"

," said on Twitter the man who, through his abundant publications on social networks, has offered millions of people a taste of life in orbit.

Read alsoThomas Pesquet becomes commander of the ISS

Thomas Pesquet returns with the other members of the Crew-2 mission - the Japanese Akihiko Hoshide and the Americans Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur.

On board the SpaceX space firm's Dragon capsule, we will also find 240 kg of equipment and scientific experiments, on which the four astronauts studied for six months, aboard this flying laboratory.

The journey to Earth will be done in several stages:

The Dragon capsule is scheduled to detach from the International Space Station at 8:05 p.m. KST.

Dragon will then begin a journey of several hours, the duration of which can vary greatly depending on the trajectory.

After re-entering the atmosphere, the vessel will make a dizzying descent before landing off Florida, a priori at 4:33 am on November 9, at dawn in France.

First water landing

The landing, which promises to be intense, is a first for the French astronaut.

During his previous mission in 2016-2017, he landed in the Kazakh steppes with a Russian Soyuz.

Once the capsule has "

" the surface of the sea ("

" in English), it will float, and the crew will be recovered as quickly as possible by ships positioned nearby.

Read alsoThomas Pesquet is he above ground?

A helicopter will bring the Crew-2s back to dry land, from where they will board a plane to the NASA Space Center in Houston, Texas. Thomas Pesquet will undergo quick medical tests there before flying to Cologne, Germany, where the European Astronaut Center is located. For three weeks, he will then be subjected to a battery of scientific tests, but which will not prevent him from seeing his relatives.

Crew-2 is the second regular mission provided by SpaceX, Elon Musk's company, on behalf of NASA.

It allowed NASA to resume flights from American soil, after the stoppage of space shuttles in 2011. Its crew returned to Earth before the arrival on board the ISS of their replacements, four astronauts from Crew-3 , whose take-off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida has been delayed several times, mainly due to the weather.