A four-member crew of NASA's Crew-10 mission departed Friday aboard SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, bound for a landing off the US West Coast on Saturday morning, following a five-month crew rotation mission at the orbiting laboratory.
American astronauts Nicole Ayers and Anna McClain, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov boarded the capsule on Friday afternoon, preparing for the 17.5-hour journey back to Earth, which will end with a splashdown in the ocean off the coast of California
The four-person crew launched to the International Space Station on March 14 on a routine mission to replace the Crew-9 crew of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the duo who departed the station in Boeing's Starliner capsule.
Five months after the end of the Starliner mission, Wilmore announced his retirement from NASA this week, following a 25-year career during which he flew on four different spacecraft and logged a total of 464 days in space.
Wilmore was a principal technical advisor for the Starliner program, along with Williams, who continues to serve on NASA's astronaut corps.
The Crew-10 capsule, carrying the four astronauts, is scheduled to land in the Pacific Ocean at 1533 GMT on Saturday.
NASA said the crew is returning to Earth carrying "important and sensitive research" conducted in the near-zero-gravity environment of the International Space Station during the 146-day mission, which included more than 200 scientific experiments on the crew's to-do list.
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