NASA Television will provide live coverage Tuesday, Sept. 10, as three of the crew members on the International Space Station return home, ending more than five months in space.
Expedition 36 Commander Pavel Vinogradov and Flight Engineer Alexander Misurkin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and NASA Flight Engineer Chris Cassidy will undock their Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft from the station 7:37 p.m. EDT Sept. 10. They are scheduled to land on the steppe of Kazakhstan southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan at 10:58 p.m. (8:58 a.m. Kazakh time Sept. 11). Their return will wrap up 166 days in space. They launched from Kazakhstan on March 29.
Undocking marks the formal start of Expedition 37 aboard the station under the command of Fyodor Yurchikhin of Roscosmos. Yurchikhin and his crewmates, Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg of NASA and Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency, will tend to the station as a three-person crew for two weeks until the arrival of three new crewmates. NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy are scheduled to launch from Kazakhstan Sept. 25, U.S. time.
NASA Television coverage will begin Sept. 9 with the change of command ceremony, in which Vinogradov will turn over the reins of station operation to Yurchikhin. Coverage will continue Sept. 10 and Sept. 11 with Expedition 36 landing and post-landing activities.
For the full schedule of landing coverage, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/stationnews
For information on the International Space Station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station
For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv
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