Sophie Adenot left the International Space Station on Wednesday after an eight-month stay, the longest by a European astronaut, and splashed down on Thursday at around 5.30 pm with three fellow crew members.
Sophie Adenot spent 235 days 400 kilometres above the Earth. After a day-long journey, the French astronaut splashed down on Thursday 8 October at 5:35 p.m. (French time), together with three other members of the International Space Station crew, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California.
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The final minutes of the flight brought intense sensations for the Frenchwoman, Russian cosmonaut Andrei Fediaiev and the two Americans Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway: a high-speed plunge through the atmosphere, then a slowdown under powerful parachutes, all while communications were cut.
After exiting the spacecraft and undergoing a brief medical check-up, the four astronauts will be flown back to dry land in the United States, first to Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego, then on to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
A medical team from the European Space Agency (ESA) will then take charge of Sophie Adenot during the long return flight to Cologne, in Germany. There, the astronaut will be reunited with her loved ones and will begin a recovery programme lasting several weeks.
Thirty years after Claudie Haigneré, Sophie Adenot became in February the second Frenchwoman to cross the Karman line, the internationally recognised boundary between the atmosphere and outer space. She also became the first French woman to venture into the vacuum of space, during three spacewalks on 18 and 25 August and 1 September.
With 237 days spent in space, the eleventh French astronaut now holds the record for the longest European spaceflight. The previous record-holder, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, spent 201 days in orbit in 2019–2020.
