14 DAY TRIAL // Three crew members from the International Space Station (ISS) will return to Earth ahead of schedule, due to the fact that a security conference is scheduled to take place around their landing site at the time when they were originally set to land.
The international security summit will take place in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. The city is located about 400 kilometers away from the planned landing site.
On Wednesday, authorities requested that the air space above the country be kept clear between December 1-2, when the summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is scheduled to take place.
“Kazakh officials asked our Russian partners if they could make the adjustment to avoid conflicts with the conference,” explains Johnson Space Center (JSC) expert Kelly Humphries, who is a spokesperson for the American space agency.
“There's some preparation work that's going to have to be changed a little bit, and some maintenance work that requires additional crew members will be shifted,” Humphries adds for Space.
The conflict affects cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, of the Russian Federal Space Agency (RosCosmos), and NASA astronauts Shannon Walker and Douglas Wheelock. They are all part of Expedition 25.
Their new plan calls for a November 25 landing on the Kazakh steppes, at around 11:46 pm EST (0446 GMT, November 26). The three spent more than five months aboard the international outpost.
According to NASA, the changes will not cause any issues aboard the ISS. The program the six astronauts currently in space follow will suffer a few minor modifications, which will allow for the three crew members to depart four days earlier than planned.
An added advantage of the Soyuz space capsule taking off earlier is the fact that the ISS will be clear to dock with space shuttle Discovery, which is scheduled to take off soon from Florida.
The orbiter, whose STS-133 flight will be its last, is now planned to take off on November 30 at the earliest, if engineers manage to fix all the problems that were found on the spacecraft.
“There was already work in the mill regarding a Nov. 30th launch of the shuttle to begin that mission. So, maybe it's going to work out nicely for the crew with this time frame shifted over a little bit,” Humphries explains.
The three astronauts will return on the Soyuz TMA-19 space capsule, and the crew of the ISS will drop to just three members until mid-December. This is when a Soyuz TMA-01M spacecraft, called TMA-20 will carry the replacement crew.
Astronauts Catherine Coleman, Paolo Nespoli and Dmitri Kondratyev will join Scott J. Kelly, Aleksandr Kaleri, and Oleg Skripochka, who will remain aboard the ISS. The six fliers will make up Expedition 26.