NASA astronaut Don Pettit, at the side of Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, will go away the World Area Station aboard the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft and go back to Earth on Saturday, April 19.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit, at the side of Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, will go away the World Area Station aboard the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft and go back to Earth on Saturday, April 19.
Pettit, Ovchinin, and Vagner will undock from the orbiting laboratory’s Rassvet module at 5:57 p.m. EDT, heading for a parachute-assisted touchdown at 9:20 p.m. (6:20 a.m. Kazakhstan time, Sunday, April 20) at the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of town of Dzhezkazgan. Touchdown will happen on Pettit’s seventieth birthday.
NASA’s are living protection of go back and similar actions will circulate on NASA+. Discover ways to circulate NASA content material via plenty of platforms.
A transformation of command rite additionally will circulate on NASA platforms at 2:40 p.m. Friday, April 18. Ovchinin will handover station command to JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Company) astronaut Takuya Onishi for Expedition 73, which starts on the time of undocking.
Spanning 220 days in area, Pettit and his crewmates can have orbited the Earth 3,520 instances and finished a adventure of 93.3 million miles over the direction in their undertaking. The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft introduced and docked to the station on 9/11, 2024.
This used to be Pettit’s fourth spaceflight, the place he served as flight engineer for Expedition 71 and 72. He has a occupation general of 590 days in orbit. Ovchinin finished his fourth flight in area, totaling 595 days, and Vagner has earned an general general of 416 days in area all the way through two journeys to the orbiting laboratory.
After returning to Earth, the 3 staff individuals will fly on a helicopter from the touchdown website online to the restoration staging town of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Pettit will board a NASA aircraft and go back to Houston, whilst Ovchinin and Vagner will go away for a coaching base in Big name Town, Russia.
NASA’s protection is as follows (all instances Jap and topic to modified in accordance with real-time operations):
Friday, April 18:
2:40 p.m. – Expedition 72/73 alternate of command rite starts on NASA+.
Saturday, April 19:
2 p.m. – Farewells and hatch last protection starts on NASA+.
2:25 p.m. – Hatch last
5:30 p.m. – Undocking protection starts on NASA+.
5:57 p.m. – Undocking
8 p.m. – Protection starts for deorbit burn, access, and touchdown on NASA+.
8:26 p.m. – Deorbit burn
9:20 p.m. – Touchdown
For greater than twenty years, folks have lived and labored regularly aboard the World Area Station, advancing medical wisdom, and making analysis breakthroughs that aren’t imaginable on Earth. The station is a vital testbed for NASA to grasp and triumph over the demanding situations of long-duration spaceflight and to extend business alternatives in low Earth orbit. As business firms center of attention on offering human area transportation products and services and locations as a part of a powerful low Earth orbit economic system, NASA is focusing extra sources on deep area missions to the Moon as a part of Artemis in preparation for long term human missions to Mars.
Be informed extra about World Area Station analysis and operations at:
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Claire O’Shea / Josh Finch
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
claire.a.o’shea@nasa.gov / joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov
Sandra Jones
Johnson Area Middle, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov
