Live coverage: International Space Station crew lands in Kazakhstan

A Japanese HTV cargo freighter departed the International Space Station Friday and headed for a destructive re-entry, disposing of trash and obsolete solar array batteries replaced with more capable power packs on a series of spacewalks outside the orbiting research lab.

A Soyuz rocket is scheduled to lift off Tuesday from a launch pad in Russia’s Far East with a new Russian weather satellite and 18 secondary payloads from companies and institutions in the United States, Canada, Japan, Norway, Sweden and Germany.

The first images beamed back to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft after it briefly landed an asteroid buoyed expectations Wednesday that the probe collected enough samples to meet the mission’s minimum requirement for return to Earth.