Astronaut Peggy Whitson, who holds the record for most spacewalks by a woman, is set to leave the International Space Station and return to Earth after completing a 228-day mission. She is also the first woman to command the International Space Station twice.
Whitson and the rest of her Expedition 52 crew, Flight Engineer Jack Fischer of Nasa and Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin of Russian space agency Roscosmos, are expected to land in Kazakhstan at 7.22 am on Sunday, according to a statement released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Friday.
The mission, which began in November 2016 and has spanned 4,623 orbits of Earth, is Whitson’s third long duration stint on the International Space Station. With this mission, she has spent a total 665 days in space, the longest by any American. This also places her eighth on the all-time endurance list, the agency said.
Whitson said she’s craving pizza and flush toilets. “Trust me, you don’t want to know the details,” she told AP in an email. When asked what she would miss the most about space, she said it would be the “freedom of floating and moving with the lightest of touch”, especially during the first few days after the return.
Yurchikhin and Fischer will complete 136 days in space as they only launched in April. Yurchikhin will now have a total of 673 days in space on five missions, ranking him in the seventh place on the all-time endurance list.
The Expedition 52 crew pursued “hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science aboard humanity’s only orbiting laboratory,” Nasa said.
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