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Shubhanshu Shukla's return - ISS Experiments 2025
July 21 , 2025
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- Indian astronaut Group Captain and the Indian Air Force Officer Shubhanshu Shukla returned to Earth on 15th July from the International Space Station.
- He has returned after spending 18 days on the International Space Station and orbiting around the Earth 288 times.
- He was part of the Axiom-4 mission, an international human spaceflight mission organised by Axiom Space, a private space company based in the United States.
- Shubhanshu Shukla became the first Indian pilot of a commercial orbital space mission and the first Indian to reach the ISS via a private U.S. mission.
- It also marked one of the first fully private crewed missions to the ISS, combining NASA’s infrastructure with commercial spaceflight.
- The SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California, USA.
- It has carried four astronauts into space along with Shukla: Peggy Whitson from America as commander of the mission, Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski from Poland, and Tibor Kapu of Hungary.
- The crew travelled to the ISS on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft using the Falcon 9 rocket.
- During his time in space, Shukla conducted and completed all seven microgravity experiments and other scheduled scientific tasks.
- These also included research on the Indian strain of Tardigrades, Myogenesis, Sprouting of methi and moong seeds, Cyanobacteria, Microalgae, Crop seeds, and the Voyager Display.
- Among the most crucial of Shukla’s experiments was the study of space microalgae to examine their ability to generate food, oxygen, and biofuels.
- The resilience of microalgae in microgravity is considered the key to sustaining human life during extended space missions.
- Tardigrades, also known as “water bears”, are robust aquatic animals that have been around for roughly 600 million years, 400 million years before dinosaurs walked the planet.
- The primary objective of the experiment was to identify the genes that are highly responsible for making these animals resilient.
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