Three crew members are scheduled to begin their return to Earth on Friday, April 5, from the International Space Station. NASA will provide live coverage of their departure from the orbital complex and landing.
NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus will depart from the station's Rassvet module in the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft at 11:55 p.m. EDT April 5, and will head for a parachute-assisted landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan, at 3:18 a.m. Saturday, April 6 (12:18 p.m. Kazakhstan time).
Coverage will begin at 8 p.m. on April 5 with farewells and the Soyuz hatch closure on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, YouTube, and the agency's website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media.
O'Hara is completing a mission spanning 204 days in space that covered 3,264 orbits of the Earth and 86.5 million miles. Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya launched with NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson to the station aboard the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft on March 23. Dyson will remain aboard the station for a six-month research mission.
After landing, the three crew members will fly on a helicopter from the landing site to the recovery staging city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. O'Hara then will depart back to Houston.
Friday, April 5
8 p.m.: NASA coverage of farewells and hatch closure of the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft begins
11:30 p.m.: NASA coverage for undocking continues
11:55 p.m.: Undocking
Saturday, April 6
2 a.m.: NASA coverage of deorbit burn and landing begins.
2:24 a.m.: Deorbit burn
3:18 a.m.: Landing
NASA's coverage is as follows (all times Eastern and subject to change based on real-time operations):