NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2 astronauts safely splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico

The four-person astronaut crew of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2 safely splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida on Monday abroad the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft. This mission completes the agency’s second long-duration commercial crew mission to the International Space Station (ISS). 

The crew comprising of NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet returned to Earth in a parachute-assisted splashdown off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. Crews aboard the SpaceX recovery vessels successfully recovered the astronauts and the spacecraft. The Crew-2 mission set a record for the longest spaceflight by a U. S. crewed spacecraft. The international crew of four spent 199 days in orbit, breaking the earlier record of 168 days set by NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 mission earlier in the year.

During their mission, the Crew-2 astronauts contributed to many science and maintenance activities, technology demonstrations, and scientific investigations. The crew took hundreds of pictures of Earth as a part of the Crew Earth Observation investigation, one of the longest-running investigations onboard the ISS that contributes to tracking natural disasters and changes to our home planet.

The arrival of the crew back on the planet brings an end to a more than six-month-long stay on the ISS and paves the way for another crew of four to launch to the ISS on 10th November on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.