Girl astronaut with most days in space to return to Earth
Official astronaut portrait of Christina M. Hammock Koch. Photo Date: January 10, 2014. Location: Building 8, Room 183 – Photo Studio. Photographer: Robert Markowitz
The girl astronaut who has spent more time in space on a single mission than any other woman, NASA’s Christina Koch, is scheduled to return to Earth on Thursday along with two of her International Space Station crewmates.
Koch is wrapping up a 328-day mission on her first flight into space. She will have spanned 5,248 orbits of the Earth – a journey of 139 million miles, roughly the equivalent of 291 round trips to the moon.
The female astronaut conducted six spacewalks during her 11 months on orbit, spending 42 hours and 15 minutes outside the station.
The other two astronauts returning with Koch are European Space Agency’s station commander Luca Parmitano and Russian space agency Roscosmos’ Soyuz commander Alexander Skvortsov.
The astronauts will depart the station the same day they are scheduled to land on Earth in a Soyuz spacecraft that will make a parachute-assisted landing at 4:15 am EST southeast of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan.
NASA Television and the agency’s website will cover the return live, with the live coverage beginning at 9 pm EST Wednesday and landing coverage beginning at 3 am Thursday.
Koch launched in March last year with Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague.
“Koch’s extended mission will provide researchers the opportunity to observe effects of long-duration spaceflight on a woman as the agency plans to return to the Moon under the Artemis program and prepare for human exploration of Mars,” said the NASA press release.
The girl astronaut saw a dozen visiting vehicles arriving and another dozen departing. She will have completed the second longest single spaceflight by an American astronaut following retired astronaut Scott Kelly after she lands, becoming the seventh on the list of US space travelers with the most time in space.
“After preliminary medical evaluations, the crew will return to the recovery staging city in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, aboard Russian helicopters,” said the release. “Koch and Parmitano will board a NASA plane bound for Cologne, Germany, where Parmitano will be greeted by ESA officials before Koch proceeds home to Houston.”
