The 3 Indian astronauts who are the Axiom-4 space crew entrepreneurs in the International Space Station (ISS) are to head down to Earth after performing the first successful two-week mission. NASA said the undocking of the ISS would occur Monday at 4:15 PM IST, with the splashdown on the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, likely to occur next Tuesday, at about 3:00 PM IST.
Launched at NASA Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on June 25, the Axiom-4 mission involved the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft belonging to the Elon Musk company. The capsule was piloted by Shubhanshu Shukla, who successfully docked at the ISS on June 26, and that marked the entry of the team into the world of groundbreaking scientific studies.
The mission is described as a key accomplishment in the Indian space aspirations, with Shukla, of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), being the first Indian to fly to the ISS on a commercial spaceflight. Even within the mission, on June 28, he held a conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, pointing to the symbolic significance of Indian participation in human spaceflight expanding.
In his mission, Shukla was joined by Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski of the European Space Agency (ESA), Tibor Kapu of the Hungarian to Orbit (HUNOR) program and Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut, and now the director of human spaceflight at Axiom Space.
The crew undertook a lot of scientific tests in the fields of medicine, plant biology, and space health. Captain Shukla worked on the area of skeletal and muscle loss under microgravity and the requirement of microalgae as a sustainable food alternative that would not spoil during long-duration space travel. Other experiments were in the area of cancer biology, blood circulation, microgreens and even mental health studies of astronauts in close ecosystems.
The mission is a major step in international space collaboration and the future of space travel.
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