A capsule with a crew of four from the ISS crashed into the sea off Florida. “Welcome home,” says the European space agency.
After a 24-hour flight, SpaceX’s capsule enters Earth’s atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico. NASA, May 6, 2022.
(dpa) After about half a year in space, the German astronaut Matthias Maurer (52) is back on earth. The space capsule with the Saarlander and three Americans landed on Friday, slowed down by four parachutes, in the sea off the US coast, as the space agency Nasa announced.
Maurer had been researching scientific experiments on the International Space Station ISS since November 2021 and also went out into space to work. The astronaut from the European space agency Esa was the twelfth German in the cosmos. He is expected back in Germany late Friday evening.
For bricklayers in the «Cosmic Kiss» mission
After the returnees had landed, ships with recovery teams set course for the approximately three-ton “Crew Dragon” space capsule from the private US company SpaceX. The “Endurance” ferry with Maurer and the astronauts Kayla Barron, Raja Chari and Thomas Marshburn undocked from the ISS on Thursday. Three Russians, three Americans and one Italian are still working at the outpost of humanity around 400 kilometers above the earth.
Matthias Maurer, Tom Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron (from left) pose for a picture in their space suits aboard the ISS on April 21, 2022.
During his 177-day mission called “Cosmic Kiss”, Mauer was involved in more than 100 experiments, 34 of them from Germany, said CEO Anke Kaysser-Pyzalla from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). “The results will help us to better understand earthly problems in areas such as biology, medicine and materials science.”
“Welcome home,” wrote Europe’s space chief Josef Aschbacher on Twitter. Volker Schmid, manager of the Maurer mission at DLR, spoke of an “enormous workload” that Maurer “mastered with flying colors”. The astronaut with a doctorate in materials science was the fourth German on the ISS.