A NASA astronaut and two record-setting Russian cosmonauts are set to head back to Earth on Monday (Sept. 23), and you can watch their homecoming live.
Russia’s Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft, with Tracy C. Dyson, Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub aboard, is scheduled to undock from the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday at 4:37 a.m. EDT (0837 GMT) and land on the steppe of Kazakhstan about 3.5 hours later.
You can watch all the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency.
NASA’s coverage will begin today (Sept. 22) at 10:15 a.m. EDT (1415 GMT), to show the change-of-command ceremony marking the end of the orbiting lab’s Expedition 71 and the beginning of Expedition 72.
Kononenko, who commands Expedition 71, will hand the keys of the ISS over to NASA astronaut Suni Williams. She and fellow NASA spaceflyer Butch Wilmore arrived on Boeing’s Starliner capsule in June for a supposed week-long stay but will continue living on the ISS until February 2025, after Starliner developed problems and returned to Earth uncrewed.
NASa’s coverage will resume Monday at 12:45 a.m. EDT (0445 GMT) to show the closing of the hatches between MS-25 and the ISS, which is expected to occur at 1:05 a.m. EDT (0505 GMT). The show will pick up again at 4 a.m. EDT (0800 GMT) for undocking, then again at 6:45 a.m. EDT (1045 GMT) for the Soyuz’s deorbit burn, entry and landing.
If all goes according to plan, touchdown will occur at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT), southeast of the Kazakh town of Dzhezkazgan, according to NASA officials.
Dyson arrived at the station aboard Soyuz MS-25 in March, along with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus. Dyson’s current mission aboard the orbiting lab will end up lasting 184 days, according to NASA officials.
Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya stayed in orbit for just 12 days, coming home in April aboard the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft with NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara. Soyuz MS-24 launched in September 2023, carrying O’Hara, Kononenko and Chub to the ISS.
Kononenko and Chub will end up spending 374 days on the station — a new record for a single mission, according to officials with Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency. The old record, nearly 371 days, was held by cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and NASA’s Frank Rubio, who lived on the ISS from September 2022 to September 2023.
Kononenko already holds the all-time record for most total time spent in space. When his current mission ends, he will have accrued 1,111 days in orbit, according to NASA.
