Two NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut ended a months-long tour of duty on the International Space Station and returned to Earth to face a viral outbreak that didn’t exist when they launched.
- NASA’s Andrew Morgan and Jessica Meir, and Russia’s Oleg Skripochka, left the station in their Russian Soyuz capsule at 6:53 p.m. PT today and touched down in Kazakhstan a little more than three hours later, at 10:16 p.m. PT (11:16 a.m. local time April 17).
- Recovery team members wore face masks as they carried the spacefliers from the Soyuz for their initial medical checks. “Please keep the distance, as the president has told us,” one team member said in Russian. Morgan had been on the station since last July, and Meir and Skripochka launched in September — weeks before the first case of COVID-19 came to light in China.
- Three other crew members — NASA’s Chris Cassidy and Russia’s Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner — are keeping the lights on at the station. The orbital outpost’s next scheduled visitors are NASA’s Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, who are due to make a precedent-setting trip on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship as early as next month.
