{"id":12537,"date":"2020-04-11T17:35:04","date_gmt":"2020-04-11T09:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/station-crew-ready-for-return-to-earth-and-coronavirus\/"},"modified":"2020-04-11T17:35:04","modified_gmt":"2020-04-11T09:35:04","slug":"station-crew-ready-for-return-to-earth-and-coronavirus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/station-crew-ready-for-return-to-earth-and-coronavirus\/","title":{"rendered":"Station crew ready for return to Earth, and coronavirus"},"content":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION<\/p>\n

\"\"
Expedition 62 crew members Drew Morgan, Oleg Skripochka and Jessica Meir pose inside the International Space Station. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nearly seven months aboard the International Space Station may be an extreme case of social distancing and isolation, but astronaut Jessica Meir says she expects to feel more isolated than ever when she returns next week to a planet in the grip of the coronavirus.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is quite surreal for us to see this whole situation unfolding on the planet below,\u201d Meir told CBS News during an orbital news conference Friday. \u201cThe Earth still looks just as stunning as always from up here, so it\u2019s difficult to believe all the changes that have taken place (since launch).<\/p>\n

\u201cIt certainly will be very difficult for me to not be able to give some hugs to my family and friends. That\u2019s something after being up here for seven months, and being the type of person that I am, that\u2019s going to be difficult for me. \u2026 I think that I will actually feel more isolated on the Earth than I did up here, just because that\u2019s part of our expected routine up here.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said the isolation of a long-duration space station flight is offset by the crew\u2019s busy schedule, demanding research and the spectacular views of Earth.<\/p>\n

But \u201cwhen you\u2019re back in your homes and the kind of isolation that everybody is dealing with right now, and you can see all of those things, or all those people, but you just can\u2019t do anything with them or experience them at all, I think that it makes it even more difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we\u2019ll see how it goes and how I adjust,\u201d she said. \u201cBut it will, of course, be wonderful to see some family and friends, at least virtually and from a distance for now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meir was launched to the station last Sept. 25 aboard the Russian Soyuz MS-15\/61S spacecraft along with vehicle commander Oleg Skripochka and United Arab Emirates guest cosmonaut Hazzaa Ali Almansoori. Almansoori spent a week aboard the lab and returned to Earth with another crew.<\/p>\n

Skripochka, Meir and physician-astronaut Drew Morgan, launched to the station on another Soyuz last July, have had the station to themselves since Feb. 6 when another three-person crew departed. But on Thursday, they were joined by Soyuz MS-16\/62S commander Anatoli Ivanishin, Ivan Vagner and NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, the station\u2019s next long-duration crew.<\/p>\n

After a week-long handover, Skripochka, Meir and Morgan plan to undock and land next Friday on the steppe of Kazakhstan.<\/p>\n

At touchdown, Meir will have logged 205 days in space, participating in three all-female spacewalks along the way. Morgan\u2019s total time off planet will stand at 272 days. He participated in seven spacewalks during his extended mission.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs an emergency physician, I understand what it\u2019s like to be at the doorway of a hospital, or a field hospital, or the frontlines of combat, and that\u2019s exactly the situation that physicians and first responders and healthcare workers are finding themselves in across the globe right now,\u201d Morgan said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m very proud to be part of that profession, but I\u2019ll have to admit that there\u2019s even a little bit of guilt that I am as separated from it as I could be, and will only return to the middle of this in the next week.\u201d<\/p>\n

Space station astronauts expect changes when they return to Earth after a half year or more in space, but the impact of the coronavirus has been \u201cvery hard to fathom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes our news is a little bit delayed and so as we\u2019re watching things, we\u2019re getting it through the eyes of the news, and talking to our friends and families back home and trying to paint a picture,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just hard for us really to understand what has transpired and how life will be different for us when we return to the Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

His advice to friends and family struggling with isolation is to try \u201cthinking about how your actions affect the actions of others. It\u2019s something we do all the time up here and are constantly evaluating to make sure that we\u2019re respectful of others at all times. And that can be very tough to do when you\u2019re living for a long time in close quarters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Skripochka plans to turn over command of the space station to Cassidy next week. A former Navy SEAL making his third spaceflight, Cassidy said he and his two Russian crewmates were in strict quarantine starting in March. While quarantine is standard practice in the weeks leading up to launch, Cassidy said nothing was left to chance this time around.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis mission, it does feel different, I will tell you, leaving Earth amidst the global crisis and the shutdown, worldwide quarantine. We knew as a crew we were going to be in quarantine \u2026 but we didn\u2019t know the whole rest of the world was going to join us.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the first week of March after he had flown to Moscow for final training, \u201cI did not come in contact with anyone other than those immediate people involved with the launch preparation,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd those people were also in the same quarantine as I was. And we were really strict about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was virtually no interaction between us as a crew and the outside population,\u201d he added. \u201cNow, anything\u2019s possible, we know lots of cases where people have thought they were good to go, but it snuck into their world. But I really think that\u2019s almost zero percent chance for our crew.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Expedition 62 crew members Drew Morgan, Oleg Skripochka and Jessica Meir pose inside the International Space Station. Credit: NASA Nearly seven months aboard the International Space Station may be an extreme case of social distancing and isolation, but astronaut Jessica Meir says she expects to feel more isolated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2010,2249,2250,1545,717,2251,190,2258],"class_list":["post-12537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-coronavirus","tag-drew-morgan","tag-expedition-62","tag-human-spaceflight","tag-international-space-station","tag-jessica-meir","tag-nasa","tag-oleg-skripochka"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12537"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}