The fourth private astronaut flight to the International Space Station is scheduled to depart the orbiting laboratory next Monday and return to Earth, NASA said Friday, reported Xinhua.
The four-member crew is set to undock from the space-facing port of the station's Harmony module aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft at approximately 7:05 a.m. EDT Monday (1105 GMT), initiating their journey back to Earth with a planned splashdown off the coast of California.
The mission, codenamed Axiom Mission 4, launched on June 25 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The crew includes Peggy Whitson, former NASA astronaut and director of human spaceflight at Axiom Space, Indian Space Research Organization astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla, European Space Agency project astronaut Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski of Poland, and Hungarian to Orbit astronaut Tibor Kapu.
The mission marks the first government-supported orbital flight for India, Poland and Hungary in over four decades.
The returning Dragon capsule will carry more than 580 pounds of cargo, including NASA hardware and data from more than 60 scientific experiments conducted during the mission.
Source: www.dailyfinland.fi
