Landing coverage set for NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, space station crew

NASA will report live on Wednesday, October 21, after six months on board the International Space Station for astronaut Chris Cassidy and two Russian cosmonauts on the return to Earth. Full coverage of the return will be available on NASA TV and the agency’s website.

Cassidy, the commander of Expedition 63, and cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner of Roscosmos will close the hatch to their Soyuz spacecraft MS-16 on Wednesday at 4:10 p.m. EDT. Your Soyuz will undock from the Poisk Module spaceport at 7:32 p.m. A parachute-assisted landing is scheduled for 10.55 p.m. EDT (8.55 a.m., October 22, Kazakh time) southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan in the steppe of Kazakhstan.

NASA coverage of the crew’s farewell and hatch closing begins Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. Undocking coverage begins at 7:00 p.m. and coverage of Soyuz deorbit fire and landing starts at 9:30 p.m.

On Tuesday, October 20, Cassidy will hand over command of the broadcaster to newly arrived cosmonaut Sergey Ryzhikov from Roscosmos. The change of command ceremony will be broadcast live on NASA television at 4:15 p.m.

The three crew members will complete a 196-day mission over 3,136 Earth orbits and 83 million miles. Cassidy is completing his third flight in space for a total of 378 days, the fifth highest sum among US astronauts. Ivanishin is making his third flight into space, a total of 476 days. This was Vagner’s first space flight.

After landing, the crew will return to the salvage town in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, in Russian helicopters. From there, Cassidy will board a NASA plane to return to Houston, while Ivanishin and Vagner will board a plane from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center and return to their homes in Star City, Russia.

At the time of undocking, Expedition 64 will begin aboard the station. Kate Rubins from NASA, the new station commander Ryzhikov and the cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov from Roscosmos, consisting of a three-person station crew, until the arrival of the SpaceX Crew 1 mission in November. NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will embark on the first long-term commercial crew mission to the station.

During their expedition, Cassidy, Ivanishin and Vagner welcomed the arrival of NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley on NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission, the first crew flight of a commercial spacecraft and the first human launch from American soil to the space station since last space shuttle flight in 2011. During her time on board, Behnken accompanied Cassidy on four space walks with battery changes outside of the surrounding complex and replaced aging nickel-hydrogen batteries with new lithium-ion batteries.

Cassidy worked on many research experiments during his time aboard the Orbiting Laboratory, including the Onco-Selectors experiment that arrived at the space station earlier this month on Northrop Grumman’s 14th commercial replenishment mission. The Onco Selectors investigation uses microgravity to identify specific cancer therapies. He also contributed to research on the droplet formation study, which assesses water droplet formation and flow, and worked with Astrobee’s cube-shaped, free-flying robots, which were tested as astronaut assistants for routine tasks.

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