On Sunday, the fresh, empty Soyuz capsule ought to touch down at the planetary lab.
For two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut whose original trip home developed a hazardous leak while parked at the International Space Station, Russia sent a rescue ship on Friday.
It was decided by authorities that it would be too unsafe to return NASA’s Frank Rubio, Sergey Prokopyev, and Dmitri Petelin on their damaged Soyuz next month as originally intended. Without coolant, the temperature in the cabin would rise throughout the return trip to Earth, perhaps harming computers and other equipment and exposing the crew in protective clothing to extreme heat.
A brand-new NASA crew of four is taking off early on Monday from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX rocket. The four astronauts who will return to Earth in a few weeks have already checked the Dragon capsule that will take them home, according to William Gerstenmaier of SpaceX, and “it all checked out fine.”