Indian-origin American astronaut Sunita Williams is scheduled to return to Earth on Tuesday evening, concluding an unusually extended stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

A spacecraft carrying Williams and three other astronauts will undock from the ISS in a few hours and is expected to splash down off the coast of Florida at 5:57 p.m. US Eastern time (around 3 a.m. Wednesday IST), according to NASA.

The crew aboard the spacecraft, named Dragon, is set to undock from the ISS and close the hatch at 11:15 p.m. US Eastern (8:45 a.m. Tuesday IST).

NASA will live-stream Dragon’s return as part of its joint programme with SpaceX, under the NASA SpaceX Crew-9 mission.

For Williams and fellow astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore, the return marks the conclusion of a journey they were originally scheduled to undertake 10 months ago after completing their eight-day mission to the space station. Their return was delayed due to technical reasons, NASA stated.

Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, recently suggested that the two astronauts could have been brought back earlier with his help.

“They were left up there for political reasons, which is not good,” Musk said during an interview alongside President Donald Trump on Fox News.

Williams, who turned 60 in September, is the second Indian-origin American astronaut to earn international recognition. The first was Kalpana Chawla, who tragically died in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster. Born in 1965, Williams is the daughter of Deepak Pandya, who hails from Gujarat, and Ursuline Bonnie Pandya (née Zalokar), originally from Slovenia.

Williams made her first journey to the ISS in 2006 aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

— IANS