After 200 days, Thomas Pesquet left the International Space Station – South West

Six months in orbit, hundreds of photos, zooms in from space. Astronaut Thomas Pesquet and his three teammates on the International Space Station started on Monday, November 8, their return to Earth. A perilous journey aboard a vessel supposed to land off Florida. The 43-year-old astronaut spent some 200 days in orbit on his second mission to the ISS.

“A pride to have represented France once again in space! “, confided on Twitter one who, through his abundant social media posts, has given millions of people a taste of life in orbit. The one who travels around the world several times a day in 1 hour 30 minutes. It is also possible to see live images from the international station, here and here.

Several steps before ditching

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, there will also be 240 kg of scientific equipment and experiments.

The capsule left the International Space Station on Monday, according to NASA’s live broadcast. The undocking took place at the scheduled time, 19:05 GMT (20:05 French time).

It must first tour the Space Station for about an hour and a half in order to photograph it from the outside. On the live video broadcast from NASA, Thomas Pesquet, having removed his suit, could be seen taking these photos through a window of the capsule.

It must then land with huge parachutes about eight and a half hours later, at 03:33 GMT Tuesday, at dawn French time, off the coast of Florida.

Three weeks of scientific testing

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 “hit” the surface of the sea (“splashdown” in English), it will float, and the crew will be recovered as quickly as possible by ships positioned nearby.

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.

Its crew returns to Earth before the arrival on board the ISS of their replacements, four astronauts from Crew-3, whose takeoff aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida has been several times delayed, especially because of the weather.