Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two NASA astronauts who have been stuck on the International Space Station for nine months, are scheduled to begin their return to Earth early tomorrow morning on a long-awaited flight home to cap an unusual mission.
After a replacement crew arrived on the space station last Saturday night, veteran astronauts Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams and two other astronauts are poised to undock from the ISS at 4.05am Irish time tomorrow to begin a 17-hour trip back to Earth.
The astronaut crew are scheduled to splashdown off a Florida coast - the exact location pending weather conditions – later that afternoon.
Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams were the first crew to fly Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in a key test flight in June.
But 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 while Starliner returned to Earth empty in September.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, the other two members of Crew-9, will join Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams.
Mr Hague and Mr Gorbunov flew to the ISS in September on a Crew Dragon craft with two empty seats.
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.
