The first astronauts to ever orbit over Earth's north and south poles have safely returned to Earth. SpaceX Dragon (Resilience) splashed down today on April 4 at 1618 UTC parachuting down into the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Oceanside, California.
The return concluded SpaceX's private Fram2 mission after the astronauts spent about three and half days spent in space. "We have confirmation of splashdown of the Dragon spacecraft. Dragon has returned home with the Fram2 crew," SpaceX officials said on the mission's livestream.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched Fram2 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, March 31. Maltese cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang funded the mission, and served as its commander. He is joined by fellow polar explorers Jannicke Mikkelsen of Norway; Rabea Rogge, from Germany, and Australian Eric Philips.
SpaceX's Dragon recovery ship Shannon intercepted Resilience following splashdown, where an onboard crane lifted the spacecraft onto the deck where the astronauts disembarked. Upon landing, the crew has foregone the usual medical and mobility assistance utilized by astronauts following spaceflight, and will assess their own strength as their bodies reacclimate to gravity unaided.
The crew will helicopter to shore, where they will begin an hour of balancing and coordination testing. Shortly after, the Fram2 astronauts will undergo brain imaging scans using a portable MRI machine. Then, after a restful night's sleep, the crew will spend another two days dedicated to their on-orbit research using a high resolution bone scanner at NASA's Johnson Space Center, in Houston.
Fram2 crew was sent into a north-to-south trajectory in low-Earth orbit at an altitude of about 437 kilometers. The "Framonauts" spent the past three days documenting and sharing pictures and videos of their views from space.
"I often say Fram2 is a Svalbard mission," Wang wrote on X. "We @framonauts all met on Svalbard, and we love the ice. The mission was planned when I lived there, and we fly polar because, in an ISS-like orbit, we are unable to see where we live. From this perspective, the mission has perfectly achieved its goal."
During their time in space aboard Resilience, Fram2 crew conducted a total of 22 science experiments including one that captured the first X-ray of a human in space. Another, called MushVroom, was aimed at studying how mushrooms grow in a microgravity environment.
The final pieces of research are being conducted to investigate the Framonauts' recovery following their time spent in microgravity.
Fram2 is SpaceX's first astronaut mission to land in the Pacific Ocean. Previous missions have all splashed down off the coats of Florida, but the company has begun shifting those returns to the West Coast to minimize the chance of debris from Crew Dragon's expendable trunk module surviving atmospheric reentry and damaging property or causing injury should pieces of the spacecraft crash back down to Earth.
