New Delhi, March 18 -- The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carrying Crew-9 members, including stranded astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) as scheduled and started return journey towards Earth. The crew is scheduled to splashdown around 3:27 AM IST (March 19) off the coast of Florida.

The returning crew also includes astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. All the four astronauts left for Earth after hatch closure and undocking from the ISS at around 10:35 AM IST.

The Crew-9 astronauts will return using the splashdown method, a technique where the spacecraft lands in the ocean instead of on solid ground. NASA and SpaceX chose this method for several reasons:

A splash...