Expedition 72 Back to Work as Crew-8 Heads to Earth

The Milky Way appears in the vastness of space behind the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft docked to the space station's Harmony module.

Seven Expedition 72 crew members remain aboard the International Space Station after the four SpaceX Crew-8 members entered the Dragon Endeavour spacecraft and departed the orbital outpost on Wednesday.

Crew-8 Commander Matthew Dominick, Pilot Mike Barratt, and Mission Specialists Jeanette Epps and Alexander Grebenkin are orbiting Earth today inside Endeavour nearing the end of a seven-and-a-half-month mission. The Commercial Crew quartet is targeting a splashdown off the coast of Florida at 3:29 a.m. EDT on Friday that will be streamed live on NASA+ beginning at 2:15 a.m. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.

Meanwhile, four NASA astronauts aboard the station slept in on Thursday following their support of the departed Crew-8 mission. Commander Suni Williams along with Flight Engineers Butch Wilmore, Nick Hague, and Don Pettit were on shift late Wednesday monitoring systems when Dragon undocked at 5:05 p.m. from the Harmony module's space-facing port. The quartet was back to work on Thursday working on standard maintenance duties and research tasks.

Williams spent her shift in the Quest airlock cleaning cooling loops on a spacesuit and checking the suit's other components. Pettit inspected fire extinguishers and breathing masks throughout the station's U.S. segment ensuring they were in good operating condition.

Human research and technology studies were on the science portion of the schedule informing researchers how to successfully live and work in space long-term. Hague collected his saliva and urine samples for stowage in a science freezer and later analysis to understand microgravity's effect on the human body. Wilmore set up the Sphere Cam-2 and filmed activities in the Destiny laboratory module in ultra-high resolution testing its ability to provide highly detailed mission imagery on future missions.

The three Roscosmos cosmonauts aboard the station worked a full shift on Thursday focusing on their complement of lab upkeep and space research. Three-time station visitor Alexey Ovchinin spent Thursday servicing life support hardware in the Zvezda service module. Flight Engineer Ivan Vagner photographed points on Earth testing a technique to determine the space station's position in orbit, while first-time space flyer Aleksandr Gorbunov worked on orbital plumbing and labeled the contents of medical cabinets.

NASA and SpaceX now are targeting no earlier than Monday, Nov. 4 for the launch of the agency's SpaceX 31st commercial resupply services mission to the International Space Station due to ongoing operations including Crew-9 port relocation and spacecraft integration for the cargo flight.

The company's Dragon spacecraft will liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and deliver food, supplies, and science investigations to the orbiting laboratory.

NASA will provide additional updates and information on launch and docking when available.

Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on X, as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.

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