{"id":12667,"date":"2020-02-06T23:07:52","date_gmt":"2020-02-06T15:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/koch-and-crewmates-back-on-earth\/"},"modified":"2020-02-06T23:07:52","modified_gmt":"2020-02-06T15:07:52","slug":"koch-and-crewmates-back-on-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/koch-and-crewmates-back-on-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"Koch and crewmates back on Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\"\"
NASA astronaut Christina Koch is helped from the Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft after landing in Kazakhstan Thursday. Credit: NASA\/Bill Ingalls<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Christina Koch, veteran of six spacewalks outside the International Space Station \u2014 including the first all-female excursion \u2014 joined a Russian commander and an Italian flight engineer for a fiery plunge to landing in frigid Kazakhstan early Thursday, setting a new record for the longest single flight by a female.<\/p>\n

Strapped into the center seat of their cramped Soyuz MS-13\/59S ferry ship, commander Alexander Skvortsov, flanked on the left by Italian co-pilot Luca Parmitano and on the right by Koch, undocked from the space station\u2019s upper Poisk module at 12:50 a.m. EST.<\/p>\n

Looking on from inside the station were Expedition 62 commander Oleg Skripochka and Koch\u2019s two spacewalking partners, Jessica Meir and Drew Morgan.<\/p>\n

After moving a safe distance away, Skvortsov monitored an automated rocket firing starting at 3:18 a.m., a four-minute 38-second braking \u201cburn\u201d that slowed the ship by about 286 mph. That was just enough to drop the far side of the spacecraft\u2019s orbit deep into the atmosphere, setting up a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan.<\/p>\n

About a half hour later, after discarding the ship\u2019s no-longer-needed lower propulsion module and upper orbital compartment, the central crew compartment, the only one with a protective heat shield, slammed back into the discernible atmosphere at an altitude of 62 miles. The ship quickly decelerated, briefly enduring re-entry temperatures up to 3,000 degrees as it descended.<\/p>\n

Twenty-three minutes later, suspended under a large orange-and-white parachute, the crew compartment settled to a jarring rocket-assisted touchdown at 4:12 a.m. (3:12 p.m. local time) near the town of Dzhezkazgan.<\/p>\n

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The Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft landed on the remote steppe of Kazakhstan Thursday. Credit: NASA\/Bill Ingalls<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Russian recovery crews, along with NASA and European Space Agency flight surgeons and support personnel, were stationed nearby and were quickly on the scene to help the returning station fliers out of the Soyuz as they began re-adjusting to the unfamiliar effects of gravity. All three appeared in excellent health, smiling broadly and waving to ground crews as they were pulled from the capsule.<\/p>\n

Returning to the bite of sub-freezing temperatures and a foot of snow, all three were carried to nearby recliners and bundled in blankets for initial medical checks, traditional fresh fruit and satellite phone calls home to family and friends.<\/p>\n

No stranger to cold weather, Koch spent multiple winters in Antarctica and Greenland as a research engineer with Johns Hopkins University and the national Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before joining NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in 2013. But the veteran surfer said before leaving the station that she was most looking forward to a walk on the beach back home in south Texas.<\/p>\n

\u201cI live near the beach and I absolutely love the water, so hopefully going for a swim or a surf or just walking my dog on the beach, feeling the sand, feeling the wind,\u201d she said. \u201cThose are things that you can\u2019t really replicate up here, so I can\u2019t wait to be out in nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the landing site, all three crew members were be flown by helicopter to Karaganda. From there, Skvortsov will take a Russian jet back to Star City near Moscow while Koch and Parmitano fly on to Cologne, Germany, aboard a NASA plane. Parmitano will get off there and Koch will continue on to Houston for debriefing and rehabilitation.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone says that getting back into gravity is such a surprise because you suddenly have to actually work to raise your own arms and of course your legs,\u201d Koch said. \u201cSo I think that will be definitely something to get used to. I haven\u2019t had to hold up even my own body weight in a long time, so we\u2019ll see how that goes.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Skvortsov and Parmitano, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on July 20, landing closed out a voyage spanning 200 days 16 hours and 44 minutes, covering 3,216 orbits and 85.2 million miles. Including two earlier station visits, Skvortsov\u2019s total time in space now stands at 546 days while Parmitano\u2019s total over two flights is 367 days.<\/p>\n

\"\"
NASA astronaut Christina Koch, Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov, and European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano sit in recliners after being extracted from the Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft. Credit: NASA\/Bill Ingalls<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Koch was launched to the station in March and was already on board when Skvortsov and Parmitano arrived. With landing Thursday, her time off planet stands at 328 days 13 hours and 58 minutes, the longest single flight by a female astronaut or cosmonaut.<\/p>\n

Her voyage covered 5,248 orbits and 139 million miles and was just 12 days short of the U.S. single-flight endurance record set by former astronaut Scott Kelly. She now ranks No. 7 on the list of most experienced NASA astronauts and 50th in the world.<\/p>\n

During her stay aboard the station, Koch participated in six spacewalks totaling 42 hours and 15 minutes. She and Meir carried out the first all-female spacewalk last Oct. 18, replacing a faulty solar array battery charge controller, and two more on Jan. 15 and 20 to complete work started last year to replace a set of solar array batteries.<\/p>\n

During their historic first spacewalk together, \u201cwe caught each other\u2019s eye and we knew that we were really honored with this opportunity to inspire so many,\u201d Koch said in a NASA interview. \u201cAnd just hearing our voices talk to mission control, knowing two female voices had never been on the (audio) loops, solving those problems together outside, it was a really special feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the departure of Koch and her crewmates, Skripochka, Meir and Morgan will have the space station to themselves until April 9 when three fresh crew members \u2014 NASA\u2019s Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Nikolai Tikhonov and Andrei Babkin \u2014 arrive aboard the Soyuz MS-16\/62S spacecraft.<\/p>\n

After an eight-day handover, Skripochka, Meir and Morgan will return to Earth to close out a 204-day mission. From that point forward, the station will be staffed by just three crew members, two Russians and one American, until new commercial crew ships built by SpaceX and Boeing begin crew rotation flights later this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION NASA astronaut Christina Koch is helped from the Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft after landing in Kazakhstan Thursday. Credit: NASA\/Bill Ingalls Christina Koch, veteran of six spacewalks outside the International Space Station \u2014 including the first all-female excursion \u2014 joined a Russian commander and an Italian flight engineer for a […]<\/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":[2362,831,2344,1545,717,1771,710,190],"class_list":["post-12667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-alexander-skvortsov","tag-european-space-agency","tag-expedition-61","tag-human-spaceflight","tag-international-space-station","tag-kazakhstan","tag-luca-parmitano","tag-nasa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12667"}],"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=12667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}