The Crew 10 crew undocked from the International Space Station on Friday evening aboard the Dragon 9 spacecraft.
Undocking was scheduled for 6:05 p.m. ET and occurred at 6:30 p.m. The hatch was closed at 4:20 p.m.
The Dragon's engine then fired several booster burns, moving away from the ISS, which is about 250 miles above Earth.
Dragon will enter Earth's atmosphere and land Saturday at 8:33 a.m. PDT off the coast of Southern California.
The progress can be tracked on the SpaceX website.
It will be the first time a crewed mission has splashed down in the Pacific Ocean since SpaceX's recovery ship Shannon moved from Port Canaveral, Florida, to Long Beach in December.
After that, the four members of Crew-10 will head to Houston.
The tenth crew launched on March 14 on a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center's pad 39A and arrived at the ISS two days later. They replaced the crew, which included two astronauts, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams, from the damaged Boeing Starliner spacecraft.
The undocking of the Dragon spacecraft, named Endurance, was originally scheduled for Thursday afternoon, but strong winds in the splashdown area delayed it.
NASA/SpaceX Crew-10 is carrying NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nicole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. They will return scientific samples to Earth.
“It's been a wonderful opportunity for Crew 10 to be here these past four months, and we're incredibly grateful to all the ground crews who worked every day to make this possible,” McClain said during a farewell ceremony Tuesday on the space station.
“We are truly very proud to represent humanity and hope to be a reminder to others of the goodness of humanity and what we can achieve when we work together,” she added.
This was the fourth Endurance mission launched in 2021.
SpaceX Crew 11 crew members Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui and Oleg Platonov docked with the space station on Saturday.
Sourse: www.upi.com
