Sophie Adenot returns to Europe after 237 days on the space station

ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot arrived in Cologne, Germany, on 10 October, completing her trip home from the International Space Station. ESA says her εpsilon mission, her first, lasted 237 days, 5 hours and 18 minutes from her launch on 13 February 2026 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. A French Air and Space Force Airbus A330 MRTT Phénix flew her to the agency’s European Astronaut Centre (EAC), touching down at 04:21 GMT / 06:21 CEST. Family, colleagues, journalists and representatives of ESA Member States greeted her on the apron.

Her crewmates were Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrei Fedyaev and NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway. The Crew-12 team left the Station on 7 October at 12:05 GMT/14:05 CEST, and the trip back took 27 hours and 29 minutes. According to ESA, their Dragon Freedom capsule came down near Los Angeles at 15:34 GMT/17:34 CEST on 8 October, after braking during re-entry from around 28 000 km/h to about 500 km/h. Recovery teams hoisted the capsule onto the SpaceX vessel Shannon, and Adenot was the third crew member out. Following medical checks on board, the crew went ashore by helicopter and then took a NASA plane to Ellington Field in Houston for initial post-flight activities.

ESA describes the flight as the longest single spaceflight by a European, beating the earlier mark, set by Luca Parmitano on his Beyond mission, by more than 35 days. The agency adds that Crew-12 is now the longest SpaceX Dragon mission, ahead of the 235 days logged by Crew-8. Adenot carried out three spacewalks in 14 days, spending 19 hours and 42 minutes in total outside the Station. ESA says this makes her the first French woman, and the second European woman after Samantha Cristoforetti, to perform a spacewalk.

On board, Adenot ran European experiments in fields including health research, materials science, biology, fluid physics, radiation physics and fundamental science. She also helped trial technologies meant for future exploration, among them the new European exercise device E4D and metal 3D printing in orbit, and supported commercial payloads. ESA counts around 218 hours spent on 35 European payloads and about 25 hours of ESA systems maintenance or upgrades in Columbus, Europe’s research facility on the Station. According to the agency, she finished every εpsilon-specific experiment proposed by the French space agency CNES as well as all ESA experiments assigned to her.

Adenot will now spend two to three weeks readjusting to gravity and taking part in data collection at :envihab, a facility of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) next to EAC, before continuing rehabilitation with the EAC training team. ESA says her social media content during the mission drew more than 403 million views and that she reached more than 290 000 students through educational programmes. ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher linked the mission to the agency’s ministerial meeting in Rome in December, saying Europe “must secure a role in exploration commensurate with its political and economic weight.”