| Title | US Astronaut Christina Koch Returns to Earth after Longest Mission by Woman | |
| Date | Sunday February 09 2020, @08:07PM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the what-goes-up... dept. | ||
NASA's Christina Koch returned to Earth safely on Thursday after shattering the spaceflight record for female astronauts with a stay of almost 11 months aboard the International Space Station.
Koch touched down at 0912 GMT on the Kazakh steppe after 328 days in space, along with Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of the Russian space agency.
[...] Koch, a 41-year-old Michigan-born engineer, on December 28 last year beat the previous record for a single spaceflight by a woman of 289 days, set by NASA veteran Peggy Whitson in 2016-17.
[...] Koch also made history as one half of the first-ever all-woman spacewalk along with NASA counterpart Jessica Meir—her classmate from NASA training—in October last year.
[...] She will now head to NASA headquarters in Houston, via the Kazakh city of Karaganda and Cologne in Germany, where she will undergo medical testing.
Koch's medical data will be especially valuable to NASA scientists as the agency draws up plans for a long-duration manned mission to Mars.
[...] The first woman in space was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova whose spaceflight in 1963 is still the only solo mission carried out by a woman.
Russia has sent only one woman to the ISS since expeditions began in 2000—Yelena Serova whose mission launched in 2014.
Both Tereshkova and Serova are now lawmakers in the Russian parliament, where they represent the ruling United Russia party.
[...] Four male cosmonauts have spent a year or longer in space as part of a single mission with Russian Valery Polyakov's 437 days the overall record.
[...] Scott Kelly holds the record for a NASA astronaut, posting 340 days at the ISS before he returned home in 2016.
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printed from SoylentNews, US Astronaut Christina Koch Returns to Earth after Longest Mission by Woman on 2024-04-24 09:10:25