ISS Commander Hands Over Control in Official Ceremony

Expedition 26 to the International Space Station (ISS) ended officially on Monday, March 14. In an official ceremony, Commander Scott Kelly handed over command of the orbital lab to flight engineer Dmitry Kondratyev.

The NASA astronaut is getting ready to return to Earth, alongside RosCosmos flight engineers Oleg Skripochka and Alexander Kaleri. Their spacecraft is due to unlock from the space lab shortly.

The three astronauts will undock from the ISS later today, March 15, and are scheduled to land in the steppes of Kazakhstan on Wednesday, March 16. They will conclude a nearly 6-month stay in space.

When their Soyuz TMA-01M space capsule departs its docking port, Expedition 27 will officially begin. Originally, the replacement crew – made up of three astronauts – was supposed to arrive in a couple of weeks.

However, a glitch with the Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft has forced the Russian Federal Space Agency to delay the launch until April 7-10. Until then, the Expedition 27 crew will operate with only 3 members.

During routine preparations, engineers at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, found an error in the capsule's Kvant-V two-way radio communications system. The malfunction does not affect primary systems such as propulsion and life support.

“Taking into account the necessity to run additional analysis of the glitch, Soyuz TMA-21 launch is postponed,” RosCosmos officials announced. The delay will not be longer than 2-3 weeks.

In addition to Kondratyev, flight engineers Catherine Coleman (NASA) and Paolo Nespoli (ESA) will make up the crew. They will be joined by NASA astronaut Ron Garan and RosCosmos flight engineers Andrey Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyaev when the next Soyuz capsule arrives.

Before the full crew is reunited in low-Earth orbit, the three space flyers currently on the ISS will need to undock and deorbit the H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV-2) spacecraft, which is operated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Given that the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that struck the country on March 11 also forced the evacuation of the Tsukuba Space Center, which handles all ISS operations for Japan, that plan may need to be delayed.

The operation was to take place on March 28, but it's still unknown when the Japanese space center will resume full operational capabilities. Without it, astronauts cannot operate the Kibo sience module on the station, which is home to a number of experiments, Space Fellowship reports.