Today a crew of four astronauts left the International Space Station (ISS) and are traveling back to Earth, due to splashdown into the ocean later tonight. The Crew-5 astronauts spent nearly six months living in space and are now due back on solid ground.
If you’d like to watch along at home, we have the details on how to watch NASA’s official live stream of the event below.
What to expect from the splashdown
The four crew members traveling home from the ISS are NASA’s Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Japanese space agency JAXA’s Koichi Wakata, and Roscosmos’s Anna Kikina. They have been on the station since October last year when their launch from Kennedy Space Center included the first time a Russian had traveled in a U.S. space capsule.
The spacecraft they are traveling home in is a SpaceX Crew Dragon which has been named Endurance, and it autonomously undocked from the station this morning. Now it is traveling back through Earth’s atmosphere before splashing down in a landing zone in the ocean. There are seven possible landing zones, located in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida. Following landing, the crew will be retrieved and returned to dry land along with research results from scientific experiments performed on the station.
How to watch the splashdown
The splashdown will be streamed live by NASA on its NASA TV channel. You can watch online either by using the video embedded near the top of this page or by heading to NASA TV’s YouTube page.
Coverage of the splashdown begins at 8 p.m. ET (5 p.m. PT) on Saturday, March 11. The Crew Dragon deorbit burn is scheduled for 8:11 p.m. ET (5:11 p.m. PT) and the splashdown itself is scheduled for just after 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT).
Afterward, at 10:30 p.m. ET (7:30 p.m. PT), NASA will hold a conference to discuss the return to Earth with representatives from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, SpaceX, and Japanese space agency JAXA.
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