In less than nine months, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams have been living on the International Space Station (ISS). They are now ready to come back to Earth. Their return trip will happen on Tuesday, March 18, in the evening (GMT), NASA said on Sunday.
Return to Earth after a long time away: Wilmore and Williams, along with a Russian cosmonaut and another NASA astronaut, will return to Earth on a SpaceX Crew Dragon ship that docked with the ISS early Sunday morning. They first got to the ISS in June 2023 on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, which was on its first journey with people on board. But because of problems with the propulsion system, the vehicle was ruled unsafe for their return, so they had to stay longer.
NASA said that the astronauts will land in the water off the coast of Florida on March 18 at about 5:57 p.m. (Central European Summer Time), or 3:27 a.m. (Indian Standard Time). The agency moved up the return plan from Wednesday to make sure everything runs smoothly before the weather gets bad later in the week.
Live news of the return
NASA will show the SpaceX Crew-9 mission’s return live, starting at 10:45 PM EDT on Monday, March 17 (8:30 AM IST, March 18) with the hatch closure preparations for the spacecraft.
Astronaut Nick Hague from NASA and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov from Roscosmos will be with Wilmore and Williams on their way back. Their exit will mark the end of an unexpectedly long stay that was much longer than the normal six-month astronaut rotation.
A long-term mission
The pilots’ mission went on much longer than planned, even though it was only supposed to be a short trip. Their stay on the ISS for nine months was much longer than normal, but it wasn’t as long as NASA’s Frank Rubio’s record-setting 371-day spaceflight in 2023. The world record is still 437 days, which was set by Valeri Polyakov, a Russian pilot, on the Mir space station.
A lot of people were worried and interested in the extended mission, and many of them were closely following their trip. Because they didn’t plan to stay in space for so long, NASA had to send the pilots extra clothes and personal items because they hadn’t packed for such a long time.
As the astronauts get ready for their long-awaited return, their trip adds to the history of space exploration and shows how hard it can be to develop new technology for spaceships.
