by Andreas Mogensen he was impressed by how smoothly he was landing.
The first European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut (and the first non-American) to serve as the pilot of a US commercial crewed spacecraft, Mogensen and his SpaceX Crew-7 crew returned to the Earth after a 197-day stay aboard the International Space Station. (ISS) on March 12.
Mogensen, speaking at his crew’s first post-flight news conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Monday (March 25), compared their splash to “plopping into the water” of a swimming pool. wearing a life vest.
“What I particularly noticed was the smoothness of the landing compared to my first flight,” Mogensen said, referring to his 2015 landing on the Kazakh steppe aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. “The IS [SpaceX] Dragon lands in water, and I think it makes a big difference.”
“It was actually a very soft flash,” Mogensen said.
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NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, who was in charge of Crew-7, agreed that the landing was soft, but then discovered that what came next was rougher than others had noticed.
“I felt like we were really spinning side by side,” she said, describing the conclusion of her first space flight, “but then everyone I talked to was like, ‘Oh, it was glass the water when you landed, there was hardly any wind. .’ So I definitely felt a lot more movement than there was.”
That movement didn’t stop when they got back to solid ground. The crew – including Moghbeli, Mogensen and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa (Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov, the fourth member of Crew-7, lost Monday’s departure, having already returned to Russia ) – under physiological tests appears. how they got used to the restoration of gravity.
“Shortly after landing, we try to walk first with our eyes open, and then with our eyes closed,” said Mogensen. “We were all a little wobbly on our feet, but still able to walk more or less in a straight line as long as our eyes were open because they were our primary source of balance after being six months in space.”
“With our eyes closed, because we haven’t used the sense of balance in our ears for six months, our brain has had to put that sensor into its array of sensors, and that takes a while. So, with our eyes closed, it was almost impossible [to walk a straight line],” he said.
“I did a nice tap dance test for the closed eyes exam,” Moghbeli said with a smile.
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Fortunately, they adapted quickly, allowing them to begin enjoying some of the aspects of life they had missed most from Earth.
“I missed a hot bath, especially in a hot spring, because water does not fall and accumulates in zero gravity,” said Furukawa.
Similarly, Moghbeli said she failed to take hot showers, but also desired a wider variety of foods.
“There you have a set menu and you can eat whatever you want whenever you want,” she said. “So my first lunch [back on Earth] it was a nice roast beef sub with some Cape Cod potato chips, and then my first dinner was a 16-ounce prime rib with fries.”
During their time together on the space station, the Crew-7 astronauts saw the arrival of seven visiting vehicles and the departure of another seven; contributed to hundreds of experiments and technological demonstrations; and Moghbeli completed the first spacewalk of her NASA career.
It was near the end of that six hour and 42 minute extra vehicular activity (EVA) that Moghbeli made world news by letting his tool bag float away and getting lost in space. The incident, which was small but a challenge in itself, helped to draw attention to another difficulty the astronauts had while in orbit.
“I found that one of the big challenges was trying to photograph a scene [on Earth] that you want to take a photo, and you try to put it out, you try to plan your day, and then you make your way to the Cupola or one of the other windows and you settle, you get ready and then it’s not there just a little. a little cloudy,” Mogensen said. “Even if it’s not cloudy, maybe it’s a little foggy or the air isn’t as clear, and then you don’t get a good photo.”
“So it’s quite challenging if you want to catch a specific target,” he said.
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That exact thing happened to Furukawa, but it wasn’t cloud or poor air quality that got in the way of his goal, a mountain peak southwest of Tokyo.
“We were in Node 1, I think, after lunch or dinner, and Satoshi was out in the Cupola taking pictures. He comes in and he’s like, ‘Well, you know, I’m very, the -, very sorry. you know, II took this picture.’ And we were all thinking, ‘What’s going on?'”
“He managed to take a picture of the tool bag as he was moving Mount Fuji. He wanted to take a picture of Mount Fuji and ended up with a picture of the tool bag,” Mogensen said, laughing.
Overall, their six months in space were very good, but some days were better than others, Moghbeli said.
“If I’m being honest, then like anything else, if you spend six or six and a half months somewhere like we did, you’re going to have bad days, absolutely,” Moghbeli said in response to a question from Space .com. “I would love to be on the space station, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever done in my life, but there were definitely days when… you realize that a lot you’re missing milestones. and things back here on earth.”
In addition, there were maintenance tasks that were less rewarding than undertaking cutting-edge science and technology demonstrations. Still, Moghbeli said, the trip was worth it.
“At the end of the day, I loved it. I was very sad to leave the space station,” she said.
