4 astronauts return to Earth after 8 months in space

According to NPR, the Crew Dragon ship called Freedom separated from the ISS on the morning of October 7, starting a journey back to Earth lasting about 27 hours. The ship activates its engines to escape orbit. The heat shield withstands extremely high temperatures of up to 1,927 degrees Celsius during the reentry process. In about half an hour, the capsule slowed down to several hundred km/h, then opened four deceleration parachutes, landing the capsule at a speed of 26 km/h.

According to Space, Freedom landed in the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles the next morning. Not long after, four astronauts were taken out of the spacecraft compartment on a recovery ship in good mental condition. Next, they were taken back to the mainland by helicopter for standard medical examinations and began a 45-day post-flight treatment process, helping their bodies re-adapt to gravity.

The Crew-12 crew includes Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway of NASA, Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency (ESA), and Andrey Fedyaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. Meir and Fedyaev had flown into space once before, while Crew-12 was Hathaway and Adenot's first mission. This quartet flew to the ISS on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket on February 13.

The Crew-12 crew was replaced by Crew-13 of 4 people, flying to the ISS on October 1. The Crew-13 mission reached the station less than eight hours after launch, marking the fastest journey ever by an American spacecraft to the ISS. The world record is more than 3 hours set by a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Initially, Crew-13 was expected to launch on September 12. However, a problem with the propulsion system on the Crew Dragon capsule named "Grace" caused the schedule to be pushed back, extending the Crew-12 crew's time in orbit by several weeks. For nearly eight months, Crew-12 astronauts performed a variety of maintenance tasks, dozens of scientific experiments and spacewalks. Meir performed four spacewalks, bringing her total number of spacewalks to seven. On August 18, Adenot stepped outside the ISS, becoming the first French woman to spacewalk, and conducted two more spacewalks over the next two weeks.

Adenot also set a record during the Crew-12 mission, spending more continuous time in space than any previous ESA astronaut (237 days). The previous record belonged to Luca Parmitano with 201 days in 2019-2020.