Throughout today, the 12 astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), featuring both members of the orbital outpost and the docked space shuttle Atlantis, will conduct the last maintenance work on the facility. This is the last day the two crews will spend together, as Atlantis is scheduled to undock tomorrow and head back home. After having successfully completed three spacewalks, the astronauts can finally have a moment to themselves before parting ways, Space reports.

After the shuttle departs, there will be only five permanent crew members left on the ISS. NASA astronaut Nicole Stott will hitch a ride with her colleagues back to Earth, marking the last scheduled time when an ISS astronaut is brought back home on the shuttles. From now on, the aging spacecrafts will only be used as workhorses, delivering and replacing the massive parts that make up the station or delivering new modules. One such example is Node 3, which was recently handed over to the American space agency and is scheduled to fly to the station in February 2010.

During the current flight, the shuttle delivered more than 15 tons of supplies to the station, which have mostly been unloaded. However, some of them are still on the spacecraft and astronauts will work throughout today to secure them on the station. The crews will part ways this afternoon, at around 12:28 pm EST (1728 GMT), but Atlantis will only separate from its host early on Wednesday. “We expect a busy day onboard the space station tomorrow to get all our final items transferred and the hatch closed on time. The mission is proceeding well,” said yesterday Brian Smith, the lead station flight director.

“One of our primary goals is bring Nicole Stott back, so we will not close the hatches if at all possible without her on the shuttle side and we'll bring her home,” said in a preflight interview Mike Foreman, a NASA astronaut and STS-129 mission specialist. The flight engineer just finished her three-month stay on the outpost and is scheduled to come back to Earth on Friday, alongside the rest of the STS-129 crew. Atlantis crew member Randy Bresnik is also eager to return home, as his wife just gave birth to the couple's second child on Sunday, a beautiful baby girl.