Samantha Cristoforetti has returned to Earth

Samantha Cristoforetti she left on April 27 for the International Space Station, and after almost six months in orbit spent conducting the most varied scientific experiments and having obtained command of the Station last September 28, she returned to Earth. The splashdown happened Friday 14 October at 10:55 pm off the coast of Florida.

The role of AstroSamantha on the ISS

There Minerva mission – this is the name of this mission by Samantha Cristoforetti – began last April 27, with the launch of the Crew Dragon Freedom of SpaceX from Kennedy Space Center in Florida and arriving on the International Space Station on the same day. It was the beginning of the 67/68 expedition that Samantha shared with the Americans Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins and then, from the end of September, with Francisco Rubio and the two cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitriy Petelin who will finish their mission in March 2023. Up there Samantha has carried out numerous European and international experiments in conditions of microgravity. Many are in nature biomedical, such as the Acoustic Diagnostics experiment for the study of the effects of noise on hearing, or as European Myotones, for the study of muscle tone. In May 2022 Cristoforetti was the first astronaut to use rHealt Onethe most powerful biomedical analyzer ever used in space.