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Four astronauts returned home after a six-month stay on the International Space Station, making a splashdown landing aboard their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule off the coast of Florida on Monday.
The astronauts, members of the crew 6 mission, left the space station on Sunday at 7:05am ET. The crew had spent the day aboard the 13-foot-wide Crew Dragon as it navigated through orbit and toward its destination landing site off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, where they landed after midnight ET.
The Crew Dragon capsule was traveling at over 17,000 miles per hour, and as it began the final leg of its climb, the spacecraft's exterior heat up to about 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit while it slice back into the thickest part of the Earth's atmosphere. Inside the spacecraft cabin the passengers were protected by a heat shield, and the temperature should have stayed well below 100 degrees Fahrenheit at comfortable temperatures.
The capsule then launched parachutes to slow its descent. Rescue crews waiting near the splash down site are planning to haul the spacecraft out of the ocean and onto a special boat, called the s nest, where final safety checks will take place before the crew can disembark.
NASA said it had been monitoring the impact of Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall Wednesday on Florida's Gulf Coast. The storm swept through northern Florida before engulfing southern Georgia and the Carolinas.
The crew of the crew includes astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, as well as Sultan Alneyadi, the second astronaut from the United Arab Emirates to travel to space, and the Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
The crew spent six months on board the orbiting laboratory, after launching to the station in March. The crew 6 astronauts worked over the past week to welcome and hand over operations to the crew 7 team members who arrived at the space station on August 27.
The crew 6 astronauts were assigned to oversee more than 200 science and tech projects during their time in space.
Axiom Mission 2 was a group of former NASA astronauts and three paying clients that included an American businessman and two astronauts from Saudi Arabia. In order to increase the number of commercial activities in low-Earth orbit, NASA has sought to increase the number of passengers traveling to the International Space Station.
It's been a big adventure and a lot of fun, he said.