Four Dragon Crewmates Prepare to Depart Station and Return to Earth
There are 11 crewmates aboard the International Space Station today but that will soon change when four SpaceX Crew-9 members depart for a return to Earth on Tuesday, weather permitting.
NASA’s Crew-9 Commander Nick Hague will lead NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov back to Earth inside the Dragon spacecraft. The quartet will undock from the Harmony module’s space-facing port at 1:05 a.m. EDT on Tuesday and splash down off the coast of Florida at approximately 5:57 p.m. NASA+ begins its coverage at 10:45 p.m. on Monday as the crew prepares to close Dragon’s hatch scheduled for 11:15 p.m.
Meanwhile, Hague and Gorbunov were still busy on Monday with advanced space research as they finished a pair human research experiments. Hague attached electrodes to his legs and explored electrical muscle stimulation as a supplement to space exercise. Gorbunov tested the lower body negative pressure suit that may help pull fluids from the upper body and counteract space-caused head and eye pressure. Wilmore and Williams spent their final station shift on standard lab maintenance and inspection tasks. Finally, the Earthbound crewmates packed and secured cargo inside Dragon for the ride home.
The orbital outpost’s newest crew joined Expedition 72 after docking to Harmony’s forward port at 12:04 a.m. inside the SpaceX Dragon then opening the station’s hatch and entering the orbital lab at 1:35 a.m. on Sunday. They launched from the Kennedy Space Center at 7:03 p.m. on Friday. NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov are beginning their months-long space research mission as flight engineers and will spend several days getting used to life on orbit.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit and Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner are due to leave the space station in April when they board the Soyuz MS-26 crew ship, undock from the Rassvet module, and parachute to a landing in Kazakhstan. They will wait for the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft to arrive a couple of weeks before carrying NASA astronaut Jonny Kim and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky. The Expedition 73 mission will begin when the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft undocks next month.
The International Space Station is orbiting higher today after the Progress 91 spacecraft fired it engines for eight minutes and 53 seconds on Monday. The orbital reboost positions the station at the correct altitude for April’s Soyuz crew swap activities.
Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on X, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.
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Mark A. Garcia
