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Science News Astronaut Tim Peake has now returned home in his Soyuz capsule, which parachuted towards the ground. The Russian Space craft carried Tim Peake and two other crew members. It fired its thrusters for four minutes thirty seven seconds at 09:22BST on Saturday, 18th June. This slowed down the vehicle’s speed by hundreds of kilometres per hour to get it down through the atmosphere. The crew members landed in south central Kazakhstan at 10:15BST. The astronauts had entered the Soyuz from the International Space Station at about 03:35BST on Saturday. After the space craft undocked at 06:53BST the Soyuz did two separation burns to distance it from the orbiting outpost. Then, at 09:49BST after the de-orbit burn, the descent module carrying the crew members separated from two other sections of the space craft, which allowed it to make the final journey back to Earth. Tim Peake said that “It’s been a fantastic six months up there, a really remarkable, incredible experience. I’m looking forward to coming home, I’m looking forward to seeing my friends and my family, but I’m really going to miss this place (The International Space Station).” His six month mission has taken him on two thousand nine hundred and seventy-six orbits of the Earth, covering a distance of about one hundred and twenty-five million kilometres. The three crew members were squeezed into custom moulded seats in a tiny ship that has not changed much in design since the Soviet era, and they waited for more than three hours before they were clear to undock from the outpost that has been their home for one hundred and eighty-six days. This was the worst part of the journey; as a space craft plunges towards the Earth at twenty-five times the speed of sound, atmospheric molecules dissociate and their atoms ionise, surrounding the space craft in super heated plasma which raises the temperature outside to about two thousand five hundred degrees C. Once the capsule has decelerated past the hot plasma phase and has reached an altitude of 10.7 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, parachutes open to further slow down the descent. As the Soyuz gets closer towards the ground, an engine fires up to cushion the landing. A rescue team then helps the astronauts out of the capsule before carrying them into a tent for medical checks. Long stays in zero gravity has lots of effects on the body, such as muscle wastage and a loss of bone density. Also the lack of gravity redistributes fluid more evenly throughout the body which causes an astronaut’s face and neck to swell which gives them a puffy appearance during their first few weeks in orbit. Britain’s first astronaut Helen Sharman, who stayed for a week on the Soviet Mir space station in May 1991 said, “to start with you actually feel faint more than anything because gravity is pulling all the blood away from your head. The faintness is the biggest reason why they will be carried. I was quite wobbly for a while even though my body hadn’t adapted to the pressure difference sufficiently in space. So it took me a few paces to learn to walk in a straight line again!” Megan Bridge 17