Having spent 11 days on the International Space Station (ISS), a Russian film crew will be heading back to Earth this evening, Saturday, October 16. They’ll be boarding a Russian Soyuz MS-18, and the undocking and landing will be livestreamed on NASA TV. If you’d like to watch along at home, we’ve got all the details below.
What to expect from the undocking and landing
The three crew members who will be returning to Earth tonight are the film crew, Actress Yulia Peresild and Producer Klim Shipenko, plus cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy who will be acting as Soyuz commander. Novitskiy has been on the station since April this year, and his colleague Anton Shkaplerov recently arrived to take his place on the ISS crew.
The three will enter into the Soyuz on Saturday afternoon, undock from the station’s Nauka module, and return to Earth, landing on late Saturday night. The Soyuz will deploy its parachutes over Kazakhstan and slow the craft to make a landing on the Kazakh steppe at 12:36 a.m. ET on Sunday (9:36 p.m. PT on Saturday).
How to watch the undocking and landing
NASA will be sharing coverage of the Soyuz’s journey home on its NASA TV channel, which you can watch either by heading to NASA’s website or by using the video player embedded at the top of this page.
Coverage begins at 4:15 p.m. ET (1:15 p.m. PT) on Saturday, October 16, with coverage of the crew farewells. At 7:30 p.m. ET (4:30 p.m. PT), coverage will switch to NASA’s events for International Observe the Moon Night. Then, later that night at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT), coverage will pick back up with the undocking, which is scheduled for 9:14 p.m. ET (6:14 p.m. PT).
The coverage of the deorbit burn and landing will follow at 11:15 p.m. ET (8:15 p.m. PT), with the deorbit burn scheduled for 11:41 p.m. ET (8:41 p.m. PT) and landing scheduled for 12:36 a.m. ET on Sunday (9:36 p.m. PT on Saturday).
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