Crew-12 splashes down Thursday after 237 days in orbit
Key takeaways
- Crew-12 undocks at 8:05am EDT on Wednesday and lands in the Pacific at 11:34am on Thursday
- The four returning crew have spent 237 days in space
- Crew-13 arrived on 1 October and has already started studies on blood clots, sleep and breathing
237 days is a long time to be anywhere, and four astronauts are about to come home from it. Crew-12 undocks from the International Space Station at 8:05am EDT on Wednesday. Splashdown in the Pacific Ocean follows at 11:34am on Thursday.
Who is coming home
Jessica Meir of NASA is the commander, with NASA pilot Jack Hathaway, ESA mission specialist Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. They hand the station to the Crew-13 team, who arrived on 1 October. Our report on how Crew-13 docked in 7 hours and 50 minutes covers that arrival.
What the new crew is already doing
Crew-13 has not waited for the handover to wrap up. NASA says the new residents have started health research, with studies covering blood clot risk, sleep monitoring through a smartwatch, ultrasound imaging of veins, breathing rate and cardiovascular response during exercise. A robot manipulation simulation called Teledroid is also in the schedule.
Most of those studies look at what long spaceflight does to circulation, which is the part of the body that works hardest to adapt when gravity goes away. Fluids shift upward, veins behave differently, and sleep gets strange. Having a returning crew and a fresh crew in orbit at the same time gives researchers a useful comparison.
What to watch next
After splashdown the returning astronauts go through medical checks and begin the slow process of readjusting to gravity. Seven people stay aboard the station. Watch for NASA's post-landing health updates, which often show how a crew handled 237 days far better than the launch coverage ever does.
