Space Station Astronauts Return to Earth Tonight: Watch It Live!

By Hanneke Weitering
published

Touchdown is scheduled for 10:47 p.m. ET.

Three Expedition 59 crewmembers are returning to Earth today (June 24) after spending more than six months at the International Space Station. 

NASA astronaut Anne McClain (opens in new tab), Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques (opens in new tab) will depart the space station in their Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft at 7:25 p.m. EDT (2325 GMT). 

About three and a half hours later, they will parachute down to the steppe of Kazakhstan and touch down southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan at approximately 10:47 p.m. EDT, or 8:47 a.m. local time (0247 GMT) on June 25. You can watch their departure and landing live here on Space.com (opens in new tab), courtesy of NASA TV. 

Related: Experience a Soyuz Spacecraft Landing with This Amazing 360-Degree, VR Video (opens in new tab)

NASA astronaut Anne McClain, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques (right) will return to Earth from the International Space Station on June 24, 2019. (Image credit: NASA)

Before the crew climbs into the Soyuz, they will say farewell to the three remaining astronauts on board: NASA astronauts Nick Hague (opens in new tab) and Christina Koch (opens in new tab), and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin. Live coverage of their farewells will begin at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT), and the crew is scheduled to close the hatch to the Soyuz at 4:10 p.m. EDT (2010 GMT). 

After the crew gets situated inside their vessel, live coverage of the undocking will begin at 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT), or 25 minutes before the spacecraft is scheduled to depart the orbiting laboratory. The Soyuz will continue to orbit Earth while drifting farther from the station for about 2 hours and 30 minutes before the deorbit burn begins. At that time, the Soyuz will fire its engines and begin the plunge into Earth's atmosphere. The deorbit burn begins at 9:55 p.m. EDT (0155 GMT on June 25), or 53 minutes before the scheduled landing. 

McClain, Kononenko and Saint-Jacques launched to the space station together on Dec. 3 (opens in new tab) and will return in the same spacecraft in which they launched. At the time, they had joined the Expedition 58 mission, but they transitioned to Expedition 59 in March after the arrival of the Soyuz MS-12 (opens in new tab) that brought up Hague, Koch and Ovchinin. 

McClain, Kononenko and Saint-Jacques will have spent a total of 204 days in space, during which they went around the Earth 3,264 times and covered a distance of about 86.4 million miles (139 million kilometers). 

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Editor

Hanneke Weitering is an editor at Space.com with 10 years of experience in science journalism. She has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.