Three astronauts will head again to Earth from the Worldwide Area Station tonight (Dec. 8), and you’ll watch their homecoming dwell.
The livestream will start in the present day at 4:45 pm EST (2145 GMT) to cowl the closing of the hatches between the Soyuz and the Worldwide Area Station (ISS), which is predicted to happen round 5:10 p.m. EST (2210 GMT).
The webcast will choose up once more at 8:15 p.m. EST (0115 GMT) for undocking, then once more at 10:30 p.m. EST (0330 GMT) for deorbit and touchdown protection.
If all goes to plan, the Soyuz carrying Kim and his cosmonaut colleagues will land Tuesday (Dec. 9) at 12:04 a.m. EST (0504 GMT) on the steppe of Kazakhstan, close to the town of Dzhezkazgan.
Kim, Ryzhikov and Zubritsky arrived at the ISS on April 8. Their 245-day mission is the first spaceflight for Kim and Zubritsky and the third for Ryzhikov, the commander of the station’s Expedition 73 mission.
By the time they touch down on Tuesday morning, the trio will have orbited Earth 3,920 times together and traveled nearly 104 million miles (167 million kilometers), according to a NASA statement.
After Kim, Ryzhikov and Zubritsky depart, there can be seven individuals left on board the ISS — Oleg Platonov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikaev of Roscosmos; NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke and Chris Williams; and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui.
Williams, Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev are new arrivals, reaching the station on Thanksgiving Day. Their launch was extra eventful than Roscosmos officers had deliberate; shortly after their Soyuz rocket lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the pad’s service platform crashed into the flame trench.
It is unclear how lengthy it can take to restore that pad, which is presently the one one able to launching Russian astronaut and cargo missions to the ISS.
