The astronaut Matthias Maurer is safely welded in the sea off the coast of Florida in the United States, as the NASA space authority announced. He and the rest of the crew-the US astronauts Kayla Barron, Raja Chari and Thomas Marshburn-had broken out on board a "Crew Dragon" capsule from the international space station.
Maurer had been researching scientific experiments on the International Space Station ISS since November 2021 and had also gone into free space for work. The astronaut of the European Space Agency ESA was the twelfth German in the cosmos. He is expected back in Germany late Friday evening.
After landing the returnees, ships with rescue teams were course on the approximately three tons of "Crew Dragon" space capsule of the private US company SpaceX. The ferry "Endurance" (endurance) with the astronaut masons, Barron, Chari and Marshburn had docked from ISS on Thursday. On the outpost of humanity around 400 kilometers above earth, three Russians, three Americans and one Italian, are now working.
Mauer was involved in more than 100 experiments during his 177-day mission called "Cosmic Kiss", 34 of them from Germany, said CEO Anke Kaysser-Pyzalla of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The results will contribute to an even better understanding of earthly problems in biology, medicine and materials science, among others."
"Welcome home," Europe's space chief Josef Aschbacher wrote on Twitter. Volker Schmid, manager of the Maurer mission at DLR, spoke of an "enormous workload" that Maurer had "mastered with flying colors". The astronaut with a doctorate in materials science was the fourth German on the ISS.
