NASA Sets Coverage for Astronaut Don Pettit, Crewmates Return

NASA astronaut Don Pettit, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, will depart the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft and return to Earth on Saturday, April 19.

Pettit, Ovchinin, and Vagner will undock from the orbiting laboratory’s Rassvet module at 5:57 p.m. EDT, heading for a parachute-assisted landing at 9:20 p.m. (6:20 a.m. Kazakhstan time, Sunday, April 20) on the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan. Landing will occur on Pettit’s 70th birthday.

NASA’s live coverage of return and related activities will stream on NASA+. Learn how to stream NASA content through a variety of platforms.

A change of command ceremony also will stream on NASA platforms at 2:40 p.m. Friday, April 18. Ovchinin will handover station command to JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi for Expedition 73, which begins at the time of undocking.

Spanning 220 days in space, Pettit and his crewmates will have orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3 million miles over the course of their mission. The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft launched and docked to the station on Sept. 11, 2024.

This was Pettit’s fourth spaceflight, where he served as flight engineer for Expedition 71 and 72. He has a career total of 590 days in orbit. Ovchinin completed his fourth flight in space, totaling 595 days, and Vagner has earned an overall total of 416 days in space during two trips to the orbiting laboratory.

After returning to Earth, the three crew members will fly on a helicopter from the landing site to the recovery staging city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Pettit will board a NASA plane and return to Houston, while Ovchinin and Vagner will depart for a training base in Star City, Russia.

NASA’s coverage is as follows (all times Eastern and subject to changed based on real-time operations):

Friday, April 18:

2:40 p.m. – Expedition 72/73 change of command ceremony begins on NASA+.

Saturday, April 19:

2 p.m. – Farewells and hatch closing coverage begins on NASA+.

2:25 p.m. – Hatch closing

5:30 p.m. – Undocking coverage begins on NASA+.

5:57 p.m. – Undocking

8 p.m. – Coverage begins for deorbit burn, entry, and landing on NASA+. 

8:26 p.m. – Deorbit burn

9:20 p.m. – Landing

For more than two decades, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge, and making research breakthroughs that are not possible on Earth. The station is a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight and to expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit. As commercial companies focus on providing human space transportation services and destinations as part of a robust low Earth orbit economy, NASA is focusing more resources on deep space missions to the Moon as part of Artemis in preparation for future human missions to Mars.

Learn more about International Space Station research and operations at:

https://www.nasa.gov/station

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