(WHDH) — After spending seven months in space, NASA astronaut and Maine native Jessica Meir returned to find Earth much different than the way she left it.
“When we landed and saw this really changed planet with everybody there greeting us in masks, it was quite a stark awakening,” she recalled.
Meir landed safely in Kazakhstan amid the coronavirus pandemic on April 17 with fellow NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan and Russian astronaut Oleg Skripochka.
“There were three of us up there and we were really the only three humans out of the 7.5 billion on the planet that weren’t affected by (the virus),” she said.
Meir says maintenance work on the International Space Station continued as normal, until landing last month.
Travel restrictions made getting back home more complicated and instead of the usual one day quarantine at NASA, she had to stay for a week.
“Our immune systems are actually disregulated a bit in space flight,” she said. “We could have been more susceptible and perhaps would not have been able to deal with the virus.”
Meir added that it was surreal to imagine what was taking place on Earth as she remained in space.
“The beauty was still the same,” she continued. “There was no difference between what we could see on the Earth in the stunning views before and after everything that was unfolding.”
From her prospective, Meir says it was “very easy for us to see that we’re truly all in this together.”
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