(ORDO NEWS) — The Dragon Endurance spacecraft has left the International Space Station (ISS) due to the completion of the Crew-3 mission.
Endurance brought astronauts Raja Chari, Kayla Barron, Tom Marshburn and Matthias Maurer back to Earth after nearly six months in orbit.
Endurance undocked from the station’s Harmony module forward port at 0520 UTC on Thursday. It is now conducting a series of descents to lower its orbit before re-entry, and its descent is scheduled for Friday at 04:43 UTC off the coast of Florida.
Launched on November 11, 2021 from the historic Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, Crew-3 was SpaceX‘s third operational commercial crew mission to the International Space Station. This is the first flight of the Crew Dragon Endurance.
The mission commander is NASA astronaut Raja Chari, who, along with mission specialist Kayla Barron, became the first Group 22 astronaut to launch on the ISS. It was the first assignment for the two astronauts since their graduation from NASA’s Astronaut Corps in 2020.
Also aboard the Endurant is NASA veteran astronaut Thomas Marshburn, who had already spent more than 146 days in space prior to the Crew-3 flight and completed his fifth EVA during the flight, bringing his total EVA time to 31 hours.
A doctor who was selected as an astronaut by NASA in 2004 as part of Astronaut Group No. 19, Marshburn previously flew on board the Endeavor spacecraft as part of the STS-127 project and the Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft as part of the ISS crews of Expeditions 34 and 35 .
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