Watch NASA TV Now for Soyuz Undocking
NASA is providing live coverage on NASA TV and its website of the undocking and departure from the International Space Station of the Soyuz spacecraft that will return NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner of the Russian space agency Roscosmos to Earth later this evening.
The three crew members are concluding a 196-day mission spanning 3,136 orbits of Earth and 83 million miles. Cassidy is completing his third flight for a total of 378 days in space, the fifth highest total among U.S. astronauts. Ivanishin is completing his third flight into space, totaling 476 days. This was Vagner’s first spaceflight.
During this latest mission, Cassidy served as commander of Expedition 63, contributed to hundreds of experiments, and welcomed SpaceX Demo-2 crew members Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley of NASA– the first astronauts to launch to the space station on an American spacecraft from American soil since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.
Cassidy and Behnken completed four spacewalks, totaling 23 hours and 37 minutes, to upgrade station batteries. The final spacewalk was the 10th for both astronauts, making them two of only four only U.S. astronauts to complete 10 spacewalks. Cassidy now has spent a total of 378 days in space, the fifth highest among U.S. astronauts.
Learn more about space station activities by following @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.
Norah Moran
Powered by WPeMatico
