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The French astronaut and three other teammates landed on Tuesday, around 4:33 am, offshore from Florida.
Thus ends the second mission in space of his career. French astronaut Thomas Pesquet returned to Earth on Tuesday, November 9, at 4:33 a.m., after a six-month stay in orbit on the International Space Station which ended with a successful landing off the coast of Florida.
>> Follow Thomas Pesquet’s return to Earth live
SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which also carried three other astronauts, was slowed down in its dizzying descent by the Earth’s atmosphere and then by huge parachutes. She landed in the Gulf of Mexico and was quickly picked up by a ship stationed nearby.
Thomas Pesquet returned with the other members of the Crew-2 mission, the Japanese Akihiko Hoshide and the Americans Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur. The spacecraft also carried 240 kg of scientific equipment and experiments.
The journey to Earth took place in several stages. The capsule was first undocked at 8:05 p.m. (French time). Then Dragon circled the Space Station for about an hour and a half to photograph the exterior. The descent to Earth proper then began, with the journey taking about eight and a half hours in total. The landing was a first for the French astronaut. During his previous mission in 2016-2017, he landed in the Kazakh steppes with a Russian Soyuz.
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