We’ve all heard the story of the Soyuz rough landing, from both South Korean So-yeon Yi and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko. However, it wasn’t until recently that NASA’s astronaut Peggy Whitson decided to talk about her experience on April 19, when the space capsule made an unexpected entrance into the Earth’s atmosphere and landed 230 miles away from the initial landing spot, as a result of technical issues.

The violent impact with the soil was quite a confusing moment, Expedition 16 Commander Peggy Whitson said, describing a feeling of nausea and an incredible gravity force which took over the capsule and lasted for about a minute, as she recalled.

Upon entering the lower atmosphere, the Russian module started to heat up, due to friction, although the temperature inside remained normal. After the initial contact with the ground, the capsule bounced and rolled before stopping.

“Everyone had told me to kind of expect a car crash at the end and I thought that was a pretty accurate description of how it would feel,” Whitson said in a telephone interview with CBS News. “The ground indicates that we hit once and then bounced and then rolled after that. My sensation was that we hit the ground and rolled. Yuri felt like we had bounced, and so he … wanted to make sure we were all the way stopped and not moving any more before he released the parachute. Because he had felt the bounce.”

The experience was similar to Expedition 6’s return to Earth, and investigators are still working on establishing a cause and prevent it from repeating in the future.

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson was the first female in command of the International Space Station and the first American to spend as much as 377 days in space. At the same time, she holds the women’s world record for spacewalking, totaling 39 hours and 46 minutes during 6 spacewalks.