Watch the International Space Station Crew Return to Earth Today

Three astronauts aboard the International Space Station are scheduled to arrive at Kazakhstan tonight at 9:58 p.m. ET. NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin will return.

The three men were aboard the ISS living and working for the last six months (188 days), where Koichi Wakata served as the first Japanese commander of the station for a duration of the stay. The three other members of the Expedition 39 crew will remain aboard the space station.

Mastraccio, Wakata, and Tyurin will begin undocking from the ISS at 6:15 p.m. ET, which can be seen from a live webcast. The landing webcast is scheduled to begin at 8:45 p.m. ET, both of which can be seen on Space.com. Their Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft docked at the Rassvet module at 3:26 p.m. and will undock at 6:36 p.m. for its return.

The spacecraft is expected to deorbit at 9:04 p.m. and conduct a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan by 9:58 p.m. The three men will complete a journey that featured 79 million statute miles and over 3,000 orbits of Earth since November 7. Their replacements, NASA's Reid Wiseman, Roscosmos' Max Suraev, and Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency will depart for the ISS on May 28. Two Russian cosmonauts, Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev along with NASA's Steve Swanson will operate as a three-man crew until the arrival of Expedition 40.

The departing astronauts took their voices to Twitter to document their last day aboard the ISS.

"Folks, my last tweet from space," Mastracchio posted on Twitter today. "Stay tuned for post flight fun."

"I feel teamwork and the crews of ground control stations around the world led to excellent results in system operation and experiments in the ISS.," added Wakata via Twitter.

NASA extended operations of the $100 billion International Space Station until 2024, and until that time, nine more expeditions (including the one in two weeks) will join three others and spend a certain amount of time in space.