(Photo : Flickr/Thomas Pesquet) SpaceX Crew Dragon astronauts
On May 2, four astronauts plunged to a pre-dawn splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico after their trip to the International Space Station, or ISS, while aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
SpaceX Crew Dragon Back to Earth
Michael Hopkins, the Crew-1 commander, along with NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, disconnected from the space-facing port of the station s forward Harmony module at 8:35 p.m. EDT on May 1.
According to Space.com., this landing is recorded as the third nighttime landing in the history of NASA.
However, the Crew Dragon executed a textbook return to Earth, dropping out of orbit, deploying four massive parachutes, and settling to a gentle splashdown south of Panama City, Florida, at 2:56 a.m., finishing a mission spanning 2,688 orbits over 168 days since its launch in November 2020.