California, United States – A crew of 4 astronauts left the NASA Crew-10 mission yesterday, Friday. They departed aboard SpaceX’s Dragon space capsule. The capsule is heading to land off the west coast of the United States, Saturday morning. This follows a mission that lasted 5 months to replace the crew in the orbital laboratory.
The Crew-10 capsule, carrying the four astronauts, is scheduled to land in the Pacific Ocean at 15:33 GMT on Saturday.
American astronauts Nicole Ayers and Anna McLean boarded the capsule, accompanied by Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian astronaut Kirill Peskov, on Friday afternoon. This was in preparation for the 17-and-a-half-hour return trip to Earth. The trip ends with a landing 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. Their goal was to replace the Crew-9 crew, which included NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams. This duo left the station with Boeing’s Starliner capsule.
Five months after the Starliner mission ended, Wilmore announced this week his retirement from NASA. He concluded a 25-year career during which he flew four different spacecraft and logged a total of 464 days in space.
Wilmore was a key technical advisor to the Starliner program. His contributions were alongside Williams, who continues to work on NASA’s astronaut team.
NASA said the crew was returning to Earth carrying “important and sensitive research” conducted in a near-zero gravity environment on the International Space Station. The 146-day mission included more than 200 scientific experiments on the crew’s to-do list.
