Sophie Adenot's eight months on the ISS: a European record and a debrief due on 2 November
· BehindLines newsroom
She spent nearly eight months in orbit. French European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Sophie Adenot returned to Earth on 8 October 2026 after her first mission, called εpsilon (epsilon), aboard the International Space Station (ISS). According to ESA she stayed 237 days; a wire report quoted in the press gives 235, a gap the sources do not explain.
A two-stage return
According to Euronews, she left the station on Wednesday 7 October and the capsule splashed down on Thursday 8 October, at about 5:30 p.m. Paris time, in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego, California. Three other Crew-12 members were aboard: Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev and NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway. After a medical check the crew was due to fly to Naval Air Station North Island, then to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. ESA says she landed in Cologne, Germany, home of its astronaut training centre, on 10 October. An ESA medical team accompanied her on the flight.
Firsts and a record
Euronews reports that her mission is the longest spaceflight by a European astronaut, ahead of Italian Luca Parmitano's 201 days in 2019-2020. She is the eleventh French astronaut and, since February 2026, the second Frenchwoman to cross the boundary of space, thirty years after Claudie Haigneré. She also made three spacewalks, on 18 August, 25 August and 1 September, becoming the first Frenchwoman to work in the vacuum of space.
What comes next
ESA has invited media to a news conference with Sophie Adenot on Monday 2 November at 11:30 a.m. Paris time, at the agency's headquarters in Paris. She is expected to look back on her mission there. The articles consulted also mention a recovery programme lasting several weeks after the return: the detailed scientific content of εpsilon is not covered in these sources and remains to be clarified at that event.