The members of NASA's SpaceX Crew-9 mission, including NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore, along with cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, aboard the International Space Station on February 26. (NASA/AFP/Getty Images)
NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore are expected to return home Tuesday after a 286-day space odyssey that started with harrowing technical problems that forced NASA to swap out one spacecraft for another and extend the mission from about eight days to nine months.
Williams and Wilmore are flying back to Earth with NASA’s Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who together are known as Crew-9, in a SpaceX Dragon capsule. The astronauts are expected to splash down under four parachutes off the coast of Florida shortly before 6 p.m. Tuesday. NASA moved up their return date by a day because it said the weather looks good Tuesday evening “ahead of less favorable weather conditions expected later in the week.”