The Crew-9 mission’s Dragon capsule had some company shortly after it hit the water on Tuesday (March 18).

SpaceX’s Crew-9 astronauts had some company in the water after they splashed down on Tuesday afternoon (March 18).

The Crew-9 mission returned to Earth at 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 GMT) on Tuesday, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida. A fleet of recovery vessels soon converged on Crew-9’s Dragon capsule, named Freedom — and so did some curious marine mammals, who wanted to check out this strange object that fell from the sky into their domain.

“Wow! We got a cute little pod of dolphins, not just one or two,” SpaceX engineer Kate Tice said during the NASA-SpaceX webcast of Crew-9’s entry, descent and landing.

Freedom carried four people — NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore and Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos — home from the International Space Station (ISS).

Hague and Gorbunov rode up to the station aboard Freedom in late September, on the launch of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission. Williams and Wilmore, on the other hand, reached the ISS on the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which lifted off in early June.