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Four astronauts aboard SpaceX’s Crew-12 mission are scheduled to leave the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday (Oct. 7), beginning their journey home after nearly eight months in orbit.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft Freedom is scheduled to undock from the ISS at 8:05 a.m. EDT (1205 GMT), with splashdown targeted for 11:34 a.m. EDT (1534 GMT) Thursday (Oct. 8) in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.
NASA and SpaceX will provide live coverage of the astronauts’ return.
Coverage is scheduled to begin Wednesday at 6 a.m. EDT (1000 GMT), ahead of the closing of the hatches between Freedom and the ISS. The stream will resume at 7:45 a.m. EDT for undocking preparations.
Return-to-Earth coverage will begin Thursday at 10:20 a.m. EDT, with the spacecraft expected to conduct its deorbit burn at about 10:46 a.m. before splashing down roughly 48 minutes later.
The Crew-12 astronauts are NASA’s Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and Andrey Fedyaev of Russia’s Roscosmos.
Meir and Fedyaev had previously flown to space, while Hathaway and Adenot are making their first spaceflight.
The four astronauts launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb. 13 and arrived at the ISS the following day. Their mission brought the station’s crew back to its normal complement of seven after the station had temporarily operated with three astronauts.
Crew-12 has now been replaced by the four-member Crew-13, which arrived at the ISS on Oct. 1, less than eight hours after launch. The mission set a record for the fastest trip to the station by a US spacecraft.
NASA and SpaceX are also scheduled to hold a press conference Wednesday afternoon to discuss the Crew-12 return and SpaceX’s upcoming CRS-35 cargo mission to the ISS, targeted for Oct. 13.
All return timings remain subject to weather and other operational conditions in the splashdown area.