WASHINGTON: An exceptional specimen came down to Earth from space on June 11. It is not a meteor or some kind of alien, but fellow human Samantha Cristoforetti, the new record holder for the longest continuous space stay by any woman or by any European Space Agency astronaut.
On June 5, Cristoforetti broke the previous ESA record of 192 days, 18 hours and 58 minutes that Dutch astronaut André Kuipers set in July 2012, according to collectSPACE.com. The following morning at 11:04 a.m. EDT, she added the record for longest continuous space stay by a woman to her résumé as she surpassed the 194 days, 18 hours and 2 minutes that NASA astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams spent in space back in June 2007.
Breaking these records was by no means part of the plan for Cristoforetti’s stay at the International Space Station, where she spent the past 199 days coordinating the docking and undocking of spacecrafts, among other duties. If it weren’t for the loss of a Russian cargo craft and resulting delay in her retrieval from the space station, she may not have set either record. Her scheduled return date was May 12, which would have put her total time in orbit at only 170 days.
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