NASA shares the first picture of astronaut Sunita Williams standing without support on Earth. @@NASA_Johnson shares: "Home sweet home. NASA's SpaceX #Crew9 touched down at Johnson Space Center's Ellington Field in Houston at 11:19 pm CDT, March 18, after their @Space_Station mission and successful splashdown earlier this afternoon. Welcome home, Butch, Suni, Nick, & Aleksandr!"
NASA astronauts Sunita Willams and Butch Wilmore, and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov returned to Earth on Wednesday onboard SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft. For Williams and Wilmore, test pilots for Boeing's new Starliner capsule, an eight-day mission stretched to more than nine months as a series of helium leaks and thruster failures deemed their spacecraft unsafe. The spacecraft returned without them in September.
Astronauts who have travelled on space missions earlier have reported facing difficulty in walking, having bad eyesight, dizziness and a condition called baby feet, where space travellers lose the thick part of the skin on the soles that become soft like that of a baby.
"Once the astronaut returns to Earth, they are immediately forced to readjust again, back to Earth's gravity, and can experience issues standing, stabilising their gaze, walking and turning. For their safety, returning astronauts are often placed in a chair immediately upon return to Earth," the Houston-based Baylor College of Medicine said in a note on body changes in space. It takes astronauts several weeks to recalibrate themselves to life on Earth.
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