Four astronauts return to Earth after six-month deployment off the coast of Florida

Four people who went to the International Space Station for six months have come back home. They landed in the ocean near Florida in a special SpaceX spaceship called Crew Dragon.

The crew members of the Crew-6 mission, which is a collaboration between NASA and SpaceX, left the space station on Sunday at 7:05 am ET. The team stayed on the 13-foot-wide Crew Dragon spaceship and moved around in Earth‘s orbit. They were heading towards a landing spot near Jacksonville, Florida. They finally landed there after midnight.

The Crew Dragon capsule was moving very fast, over 17,000 miles per hour. When it started its final descent, the outside of the spacecraft got very hot, reaching about 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. This happened as it passed through the thickest part of Earth’s atmosphere. Inside the space vehicle, a shield protected the passengers from heat. The temperature should have been comfortable and not gone beyond 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37. 8

The capsule then released sets of parachutes to help it descend more slowly. The rescuers are ready to bring the spacecraft out of the water and onto a special boat called the “Dragon’s nest. ” Once on the boat, they will do some important safety checks before the crew can get off.

NASA said that they were watching the impact Hurricane Idalia had on Florida‘s Gulf Coast before the astronauts left the space station. The big storm hit northern Florida really hard and then went through southern Georgia and into the Carolinas.

The Crew-6 team has four astronauts. They are Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg from NASA, Sultan Alneyadi from the United Arab Emirates, who is the second astronaut from his country to go to space, and Andrey Fedyaev, a cosmonaut from Russia.

The team spent six months on the space station after going up in March. In the last week, the Crew-6 astronauts helped the Crew-7 team members settle in and take over the work at the space station. The Crew-7 team arrived on August 27.

During their time in space, the Crew-6 astronauts were supposed to supervise over 200 science and technology projects.

“We accomplished many tasks during our mission,” Hoburg said during a virtual news conference with the astronauts on August 23. We had two spaceships from SpaceX called CRS-27 and CRS-28 that came to visit. They brought a lot of scientific stuff with them. And all of us, as a team, went on three spacewalks.

While they were visiting, the Crew-6 astronauts also met with the Axiom Mission 2 crew. This crew consisted of a former NASA astronaut and three passengers who paid to be there. The passengers included an American businessman and two astronauts from Saudi Arabia. The flight was a part of a plan to regularly take tourists and other customers to the International Space Station. NASA wants to have more private businesses operating in the area close to Earth.

“It has been a great experience and very enjoyable,” Hoburg said.