Posts: 2478
From: U.K.
Registered: Jul 2009

posted 07-20-2020 04:05 AM               

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I was wondering which artifact or object has spent the longest time is space before being recovered and returned to Earth.

The LDEF springs to mind as a likely candidate, as do the pieces retrieved from Surveyor 3 by the Apollo 12 crew, but are they the longest?

Posts: 44272
From: Houston, TX
Registered: Nov 1999

posted 07-20-2020 04:34 AM               

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A contender might be a Battery Charge/Discharge Unit (BCDU) that failed on the P6 truss of the International Space Station and then was returned to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon in January 2020 after almost 19 years in orbit.

From Tristan Moody, a Boeing systems engineer, via Twitter:

This battery charger spent almost nineteen years on the P6 truss segment of the International Space Station, making it (to my knowledge) the longest flown piece of hardware ever returned from space. Each colored flag points to a meteoroid or orbital debris strike we found on inspection.

Also, as mentioned in the above linked Twitter thread, there were pieces of original insulation removed and returned to Earth on the final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission in 2009 that had been part of the observatory since its launch in 1990, 19 years earlier.