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Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore pose for final photos from ISS before Earthbound trip
NASA released their final photo aboard the station before they packed up and closed the hatches to begin a 17-hour trip back to Earth.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are beginning their journey back to Earth today after being stranded at the International Space Station (ISS) for nine months.
NASA's live coverage of the Earthbound journey showed Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore posing for their final photos aboard the station before they packed up and closed the hatches to begin a 17-hour trip back to Earth early on Tuesday.
After their autonomous undocking from the ISS, the astronaut crew is scheduled to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico at 5:57 PM ET Tuesday, with the exact location depending on local weather conditions. They will be flown to NASA's Johnson Space Center for a few days of routine post-mission medical checks.
Their ride home is a Crew Dragon capsule from Elon Musk's SpaceX, part of a contingency plan devised by NASA last year after the failure of the Boeing Starliner capsule that took them to the station in June.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, the other two members of Crew-9, flew to the ISS in September on a Crew Dragon craft with two empty seats. They joined Wilmore and Williams on Tuesday's return trip.
NASA previously planned to return Crew-9 on Wednesday night, but unfavorable weather later in the week would have complicated the Crew Dragon capsule's return, leading the agency to move the return trip up to Tuesday.
Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore mission a blow to Boeing space unit
The space station departure is the start of a highly anticipated end to the drawn-out saga of "Butch and Suni", who had been part of a key test mission with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft. The mission was initially expected to last eight days. Wilmore and Williams were the first crew to fly the Starliner in a test flight for the capsule in June.
The failed test mission was another blow to Boeing's space unit, which has struggled for years to bring Starliner to market to compete with SpaceX's Crew Dragon, a dominant vehicle in the global human spaceflight domain.
After issues with the craft's propulsion system, NASA deemed it too risky to bring the astronaut duo back home and opted to fold them into the agency's Crew-9 mission instead. Starliner returned to Earth empty in September.
Wilmore and Williams' mission turned into a normal NASA rotation to the ISS and they have been doing scientific research and conducting routine maintenance with the station's other five astronauts.
The ISS, about 254 miles in altitude, is a football field-sized research lab that has been housed continuously by international crews of astronauts for nearly 25 years, a key platform of science diplomacy mainly managed by the US and Russia.
