Emirati astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi is due to return to Earth after a historic six-month mission in space, which marked the longest Arab space sojourn to date. With this, the UAE national become the first Arab to perform a spacewalk and welcome Saudi astronauts Ali al-Qarni and Rayyanah Barnawi \u2013 the first Arab woman ever sent into orbit \u2013 on board the International Space Station (ISS).<\/p>\n
On September 2, the Emirati astronaut \u2013 who has broken several records during his mission and conducted vital tests to help benefit life on Earth \u2013 will return with NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev on a SpaceX Dragon capsule with an expected splashdown off the coast of Florida, US, on Sunday will leave ISS, where he has been working since March 3, to begin a 24-hour voyage back home, reports AlArabia English News service.<\/p>\n
\u201cSultan and Crew-6 are now preparing to return to Earth and we are ready to welcome them back,\u201d Salem al-Marri, director general of the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, which heads the UAE’s astronaut programme, posted on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.<\/p>\n
His mission saw al-Neyadi \u2013 who is only the second person from his country to fly to space and the first to launch from US soil as part of a long-duration space station team \u2013 conduct more than 200 experiments on the orbiting outpost.<\/p>\n
In April, he officially became the first Arab astronaut to perform a spacewalk, for which he trained for more than 55 hours at NASA\u2019s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) in Johnson Space Center, Houston. During his spacewalk \u2013 which lasted seven hours \u2013 al-Neyadi worked to update the power channels on ISS.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t feel it because I was really focusing on the mission and it was (a) really great feeling, just to see that you are floating in a spacesuit,\u201d al-Neyadi told international media at the time. He has followed in the footsteps of other Arab astronauts, including Emirati Hazzaa al-Mansouri, who became the first Arab on the ISS in 2019, and Saudi Arabia\u2019s Prince Sultan bin Salman, who became the first Arab to travel to space in 1985.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Emirati astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi is due to return to Earth after a historic six-month mission in space, which marked the longest Arab space sojourn to date. With this, the UAE national become the first Arab to perform a spacewalk and welcome Saudi astronauts Ali al-Qarni and Rayyanah Barnawi \u2013 the first Arab woman ever sent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":137629,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,19],"tags":[7226,7225,7227,70],"class_list":["post-137628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-regional","tag-astronaut","tag-emirati","tag-sultanalneyadi","tag-uae"],"yoast_head":"\n