Surprise visitors for Sunita Williams. Look who came to welcome NASA astronauts on Earth right after Crew-9 splashdown

SpaceX Crew-9 is now back on Earth in their SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, Freedom. As they splashed down off the coast of Florida near Tallahassee, the astronauts had some surprise visitors: a "cute little pod of dolphins."

"The unplanned welcome crew! Crew-9 had some surprise visitors after splashing down this afternoon," NASA posted on X with a video.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams returned to Earth on Tuesday, hitching a different ride home to close out a saga that began with a bungled test flight more than nine months ago.

Their SpaceX capsule landed into the "Gulf of America" on March 19, just hours after departing the International Space Station. Splashdown took place off the coast of Tallahassee in the Florida Panhandle, bringing their unplanned odyssey to an end.

NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore were expected to be in space for around a week or so after launching on Boeing's new Starliner crew capsule on June 5.

So many problems cropped up on the way to the space station that NASA eventually sent Starliner back empty and transferred the test pilots to SpaceX, pushing their homecoming into February. Then SpaceX capsule issues added another month's delay.

Wilmore and Williams ended up spending 286 days in space — 278 days longer than anticipated when they launched. They circled Earth 4,576 times and traveled 121 million miles (195 million kilometers) by the time of splashdown.

NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing after the shuttle program ended, in order to have two competing US companies for transporting astronauts to and from the space station until it's abandoned in 2030 and steered to a fiery reentry. By then, it will have been up there more than three decades; the plan is to replace it with privately run stations so NASA can focus on moon and Mars expeditions.