On Thursday, June 11, three International Space Station crew members will depart the orbiting laboratory. They will come back after over six months of doing scientific research and technology demonstrations in space.

Coverage of their station departure and returning to Earth will be showed on NASA Television. Their coverage will begin at 10:40 am EDT on Wednesday, June 10. It will start when Expedition 43 Commander Terry Virts of NASA will give command of the space station to cosmonaut Gennady Padalka of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos).

Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos and Virts and Flight Engineers Samantha Cristoforetti of ESA (European Space Agency) will undock their Soyuz spacecraft from the space station and reach Kazakhstan at 9:43 am.

They will return after 199 days in space; during this period they traveled over 84 million miles since their launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Their return date was rescheduled in order to allow Roscosmos to look into the reason behind loss of the unpiloted Progress 59 cargo ship in April.

The Virts, Shkaplerov and Cristoforetti are scheduled to land in Kazakhstan on Thursday and with this, Virts will have covered 212 days in space on two flights. The first was on space shuttle mission STS-130 in 2010. Shkaplerov will have logged 364 days in space on two flights, out of which the first was on Expedition 29/30 in 2011.

Under the command of Padalka, Expedition 44 officially starts aboard the station, when the Soyuz undocks.