By Richard Tew
This Saturday, April 19, NASA astronaut Don Pettit, Roscosmos Cosmonauts Alexey Ovchini and Ivan Vagner will leave the ISS via a Soyus MS-26 spacecraft for a return to Earth around 9:20 p.m.local time, later landing on the steppe of Kazakstan. The landing with coincide with Pettit’s 70th birthday.
According to the NASA stats, the trio have orbited the Earth 220 days, flown around it 3,520 times and have traveled 93.3 million miles in the process.
This marks the fourth trip to space for Pettit and Ovchinin and the second time for Vagner.
Next Monday April 21, SpaceX will launch a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon9 rocket to send nearly 7,000 pounds of needed supplies to the International Space Station. This will make the 32nd resupply mission using SpaceX Falcon rockets for the heavy lifting.
If all goes to plan, the launch will commence at 4:15 a.m. Eastern Time at Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Dragon Spacecraft is expected to dock autonomously with the ISS via the zenith port on the station’s Harmony module.
Part of the payload is equipment and food for astronauts. There are also various scientific experiments included free-floating robots. In addition, there’s also an enhanced air quality monitoring system and two atomic clocks used to examine fundamental physics concepts such as relatively and test worldwide synchronization of precision timepieces.
The dragon spacecraft is expected to stay attached to the ISS before departing and landing back on earth in the waters off of California later in May. Watch both the launch and docking on NASA+.
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