Two Russian cosmonauts and an American space tourist are on their way back to Earth tonight after a successful departure from the International Space Station.Strapped into a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, Sergei Volkov, Oleg Kononenko and Richard Garriott slowly backed away from the international outpost, drifting toward a point about 12 miles from the station.
Soyuz engines then will be fired in a retrograde burn, slowing the spacecraft enough to drop it out of orbit and into a fiery plunge back through the atmosphere.
"Good luck guys," a specialist in the Russian Mission Control Center outside Moscow said. "We'll see you on the ground."
The return will be the first since a Russian investigation into back-to-back ballistic rentries -- steep descents that exposed crews to gravitational forces three times those encountered during normal landings. The October 2007 and April 2008 landings both missed their marks by hundreds of miles, triggering harried scrambles by recovery forces. The details are in the 4:14 p.m. post below.
You can watch the action unfold here in The Flame Trench beginning at 10:30 p.m. We'll webcast live NASA TV coverage of the deorbit burn at 10:44 p.m. as well as the landing at 11:36 p.m. Simply click the NASA TV box on thr righthand side of the page to watch our NASA TV viewer and refresh this page for periodic updates.
You can also click to enlarge the images in this series of NASA screen grabs, which show the space station from the point of view of the departing Soyuz:
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