After 141 days aboard the International Space Station, three astronauts are scheduled to return to Earth Thursday night and their landing will be streamed live.
NASA astronaut Kevin Ford, cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin will board a Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft that is scheduled to launch from the space station at 8:30 p.m. EDT. The trio is then going to make the descent through the Earth's atmosphere and are expected to land at 11:57 p.m. EDT in Kazakhstan.
Three astronauts will remain aboard the space station and will be led by Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield marking the beginning of Expedition 35. Ford was the previous leader of the crew during Expedition 34.
"Chris brings his super, super special talents to the table," said Ford, according to Space.com. "He is a uniquely talented person on the planet and now a uniquely talented person off the planet."
NASA astronaut Thomas Marshburn and cosmonaut Roman Romanenko will remain aboard with Hadfield. On March 28, the same Soyuz spacecraft used for today's landing will be used to launch cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov, Alexander Misurkin and NASA astronaut Chris Caddiry to the space station bring the total number of crew members to six.
The International Space Station has been rotating crews since 2000. The $100 billion space station is a joint project representing the space agencies of the U.S., Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada.
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