[WATCH] Cedar Falls Astronaut Safely Returns To Earth

One Northeastern Iowa native has completed a successful six month mission.

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Astronaut Raja Chari, formerly of Cedar Falls, has safely returned to Earth. This comes after a 177 day mission on the International Space Station. On May 4th, NASA announced that Chari and three of his crewmates would be completing their out of this world mission.

Chari served as Commander on the four person mission to the  International Space Station on the Endurance Crew Dragon spacecraft. Chari and his crewmates Tom Marshburn, Kayla Barron, and Matthias Maurer set out on their voyage in November of 2021.

Chari was the lead of a project at the International Space Station called the XRoots experiment, according to reports. It is considered the largest series of zero-gravity tests at the ISS.

The team otherwise referred to as Crew-3 successfully completed the hatch closure on the space station at around 11 PM EST on May 4th. Approximately 24 hours before touching back down to Earth, the team undocked from the Harmony module’s forward port inside Dragon, according to the NASA blogs.

After that it was relatively smooth sailing on the return trip to Earth.

You can watch the video of SpaceX Crew-3 completing this step of their return journey.

Crew-3 touched down somewhere off the coast of Tampa, Florida at approximately 12:45 AM EST on Friday, May 6th. Thus, completing Chari's very first space mission.

A team running the recovery ship "Shannon" were sent out along with two fast boats to complete the recovery mission.

Interestingly enough, you can watch the full landing process down below!