With one last task to carry out, a space station Cygnus cargo ship loaded with trash and no-longer-needed equipment fell back to Earth Wednesday, hitting the discernible atmosphere 60 miles or so above the Pacific Ocean at nearly 5 miles per second.
A Soyuz spacecraft carrying a three-man crew parachuted to the flat grasslands of Kazakhstan on Saturday, returning home from the International Space Station with cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, NASA astronaut Tim Kopra and British flight engineer Tim Peake.
A Russian cosmonaut, a NASA astronaut and a British flier strapped into a Soyuz spacecraft, undocked from International Space Station and plunged back to Earth Saturday, safely landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 186-day mission.
Veteran Soyuz commander Yuri Malenchenko, outgoing space station skipper Tim Kopra and British astronaut Tim Peake departed the International Space Station early Saturday aboard the Soyuz TMA-19M capsule and landed in Kazakhstan at 0915 GMT (5:15 a.m. EDT).
Three space station crew members made final preparations Friday for undocking and landing in Kazakhstan early Saturday to close out a 186-day stay in orbit.
Bidding farewell to the International Space Station today, the commercial Cygnus cargo ship separated to a safe distance before igniting an intentional fire in microgravity like never before, all in the name of science.
Russian managers have delayed the launch of a Russian-U.S.-Japanese crew to the International Space Station two weeks until early July to allow time for additional software testing on an upgraded version of the Soyuz spacecraft.
International Space Station astronaut Jeff Williams opened the hatch and floated into the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, experimental habitat today for the first time.
Soyuz commander Anatoly Ivanishin and flight engineers Kate Rubins of NASA and Takuya Onishi of JAXA conduct final qualification training at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center for their flight to the International Space Station in June.
Mission control halted the expansion of Bigelow Aerospace’s experimental space station module Thursday after the structure did not grow as predicted when air began flowing into it.