\u201cThis was a deliberate decision to allow the right medical evaluations to happen on the ground, where the full range of diagnostic capability exists. It\u2019s the right call, even if it\u2019s a bit bittersweet.\u201d<\/p>\n
James Polk, Nasa\u2019s chief health and medical officer, said \u201clingering risk\u201d and a \u201clingering question as to what that diagnosis is\u201d led to the decision to bring back the crew earlier than originally scheduled.<\/p>\n
The four members of Crew-11 arrived at the ISS in early August and had been scheduled to stay onboard the space station until they were rotated out in mid-February with the arrival of the next crew.<\/p>\n
American astronaut Chris Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, who arrived at the station in November aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, will remain on the ISS.<\/p>\n
The Russian Roscosmos space agency operates alongside Nasa on the space station, and the two agencies take turns transporting a citizen of the other country to and from the orbiter – one of the few areas of bilateral co-operation that still endure between the US and Russia.<\/p>\n
Ready for the unexpected<\/p>\n
Continuously inhabited since 2000, the International Space Station seeks to showcase multinational co-operation, bringing together Europe, Japan, the US, and Russia.<\/p>\n
Located some 400km above Earth, the ISS functions as a testbed for research that supports deeper space exploration – including eventual missions to return humans to the Moon and onward to Mars.<\/p>\n
The four astronauts being evacuated had been trained to handle unexpected medical situations, said Amit Kshatriya, a senior Nasa official, praising how they have dealt with the situation.<\/p>\n
The ISS is set to be decommissioned after 2030, with its orbit gradually lowered until it breaks up in the atmosphere over a remote part of the Pacific Ocean called Point Nemo, a spacecraft graveyard.<\/p>\n
-Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThis was a deliberate decision to allow the right medical evaluations to happen on the ground, where the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[44096,74,24322,138464,138465,1549,1888,32503,3011,78,1019,8647,76,13451,12514,3523,7239,4486,111,139,69,138466,12064,147,1551,5976,392,13655,165,61,1865,3608],"class_list":["post-233518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-aboard","tag-after","tag-astronauts","tag-crewmembers","tag-depart","tag-evacuation","tag-first","tag-firstever","tag-four","tag-in","tag-international","tag-iss","tag-issue","tag-laboratory","tag-leave","tag-medical","tag-mission","tag-month","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-orbiting","tag-prompted","tag-science","tag-set","tag-short","tag-space","tag-station","tag-their","tag-to","tag-today","tag-were"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}