Astronauts Sunita, Butch, finally on way to Earth

Washington:Nasa astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams departed the International Space Station (ISS) early on Tuesday morning in a SpaceX capsule for a long-awaited trip back to Earth, nine months after their faulty Boeing Starliner craft upended what was to be a roughly week-long test mission. The crew, formally part of Nasa’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission, is scheduled for a splashdown off Florida’s coast at 3.27 am Wednesday IST. A Nasa official said the weather conditions for the splashdown were expected to be “pristine.”

Upon landing, the astronauts will be flown to their crew quarters at the space agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for several days of health checks, per routine for astronaut returns, before Nasa flight surgeons approve they can go home to their families.

Living in space for months can affect the human body in multiple ways, from muscle atrophy to possible vision impairment.

Radiation exposure is also a challenge on long-duration missions, even before considering the psychological toll of isolation.

Upon splashing down, Wilmore and Williams will have logged 286 days in space — longer than the average six-month ISS mission length, but far short of US record holder Frank Rubio. His continuous 371 days in space ending in 2023 was the unexpected result of a coolant leak on a Russian spacecraft.

Williams, capping her third spaceflight, will have tallied 608 cumulative days in space, the second most for any US astronaut after Peggy Whitson’s 675 days. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko set the world record last year at 878 cumulative days.

Wilmore and Williams, two veteran Nasa astronauts and retired US Navy test pilots, strapped inside their Crew Dragon spacecraft along with two other astronauts undocked from the orbiting laboratory at 1.05 am ET (0505 GMT), embarking on a 17-hour trip to Earth.

“Crew-9 is going home,” said commander Nick Hague from inside the capsule as it slowly backed up and away from the station for what a Nasa official described on the live webcast of the event as “the trip downhill.”

Hague said it was a privilege to “call the station home” as part of an international effort for the “benefit of humanity.”

Dressed in re-entry suits, boots and helmets, the astronauts were seen earlier on Nasa’s live footage laughing, hugging and posing for photos with their colleagues from the station shortly before they were shut into the capsule for two hours of final pressure, communications and seal tests.

Wilmore and Williams’ homecoming caps an end to an unusual, drawn-out mission filled with uncertainty and technical troubles that have turned a rare case of Nasa’s contingency planning - as well as failures of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft - into a global and political spectacle. Their plight captured the world’s attention, giving new meaning to the phrase “stuck at work.” — Agencies