NATIONWIDE -- After spending nearly five months on the International Space Station, NASA's four-member Crew-10 is set to undock from the floating laboratory and head back down to Earth in a splashdown on Thursday.
The commute back home will take nearly 24 hours.
NASA astronauts Cmdr. Anne McClain and pilot Nichole Ayers, mission specialists Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov will climb back into SpaceX's Dragon capsule Endurance past noon on Thursday, stated NASA.
Endurance will undock from the station's Harmony module at around 12:05 p.m. ET, where it will be fully autonomous from the moment it undocks to the splashdown. The splashdown is set to happen at around 11:58 a.m. ET, Friday.
However, the crew can take control of the capsule if needed.
But the ride down will be far more exhilarating than an amusement park ride at Universal. Using a series of parachute deployments, the Dragon will slow down from an orbital speed of about 17,500 mph (2,816 kph) to 350 mph (482 kph) to about 16 mph (25 kph) when it should softly land in the ocean.
And things were a bit warm for the Dragon has it will encounter temperatures of 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,927 degrees Celsius) once it hits Earth's atmosphere. The spacecraft's special shielding and the air conditioning system will keep the crew safe and cool.
It is not known exactly where Endurance's splashdown will be since NASA is still currently figuring out the weather conditions at various destinations off of California's coast.
Depending on where the Dragon will be screaming over, some lucky people may hear a sonic boom.
Learn all about sonic booms here.
Originally, the undocking and splashdown was supposed to take place on Wednesday, but NASA cited that date was scrubbed due to "high wind predictions" at the different splashdown zones.
Crew-10 spent many months conducting various experiments after they were launched from Lauch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in March 2025.
Some of these experiments include how cells can sense gravity, orbital effects on planets and testing out a free-flying camera.