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Bumpy landing scares astronaut
21/04/2008 14:38 - (SA)
Star City - South Korea's first
astronaut said on Monday she was scared at the sight of flames
licking the outside of her Russian re-entry capsule while she
and two crewmates made a bumpy return to Earth.
Yi So-yeon, a nanotechnology engineer from Seoul, returned
to Earth on Saturday after 11 days aboard the International
Space Station, along with Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and
US astronaut Peggy Whitson.
A technical glitch made their re-entry into the Earth's
atmosphere much steeper than usual, and they landed in the
steppes of Kazakhstan about 420km away from their
planned landing site.
The so-called "ballistic" re-entry exposed the crew to twice
the usual gravitational forces. The flames Yi described may have
been caused by friction heating the capsule as it fell through
the atmosphere.
Speaking at a press conference at the cosmonaut training
centre outside Moscow, Yi appeared happy and said despite her
fear she took her cues from the behaviour of her crewmates.
"During the descent there was some kind of fire outside the
Soyuz capsule because we were going through the atmosphere. At
first I was scared, but the two other guys looked okay, so I
tried to look okay, too," she said.
Whitson told reporters that Saturday's ballistic landing,
which plotted a steeper, more direct trajectory towards earth
than planned, was irregular but not an emergency.
"The Soyuz has been through its history very reliable, there
has obviously been some issue in the last couple of descents
which went ballistic, but I'm sure the engineers will determine
what the problems are and get them fixed," she said.
Whitson appeared frail and was escorted by a Russian space
agency worker to her seat at the news conference after spending
almost 185 days in space.
In October, a Soyuz capsule carrying Malaysia's first space
tourist touched down about 200km off course in a
similar ballistic landing caused by a technical glitch.
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