After about eight months and 250 miles above Earth in the International Space Station (ISS), NASA astronaut Chris Williams – who grew up in Potomac and graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring in 2001 – is scheduled to return to Earth Sunday.
Williams, 42, is expected to land on the steppe of Kazakhstan on Sunday at 6:25 a.m. Eastern Time in a parachute-assisted landing. The location, an immense, open grassland in Central Asia is where Russian Soyuz spacecraft commonly land after returning from the ISS.
Astronaut Chris Williams captured the aurora australis (southern lights) crowning the Earth’s atmosphere and a robotic arm stretching from a power and data grapple fixture attached to the Harmony module. Photo credit: NASA/Chris Williams
NASA will be streaming the event on NASA+ (the agency’s free streaming platform), the NASA app, third-party streaming services and social media platforms including Facebook, Twitch, X and YouTube. More information on streaming the landing can be found here.
After landing, Williams will travel to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to undergo post-flight medical evaluations. NASA constantly tracks astronauts before, during and after spaceflight through their blood and urine to better understand how missions over several months affect the human body. By doing so, they can attempt to develop countermeasures for future missions.
Williams, who now lives in Houston, has been busy in the ISS conducting scientific research and experiments, carrying out two spacewalks, and helping maintain the orbiting laboratory.
He has also found time to nurture his photography hobby. He’s been taking lots of photos while in space and should have a full album from his travels to share with his parents, who still live in Potomac.
An earlier version of this story appeared in the issue of Bethesda Magazine.