Flight Engineer Ricky Arnold, KE5DAU, will join Expedition 56 Commander Drew Feustel and Flight Engineer and Soyuz Commander Oleg Artemyev on an October 4 return voyage to Earth after more than about 6 months in space. They will travel in a Soyuz MS-08 spacecraft heading for a parachute-assisted landing on the Kazakh Steppe some 3 hours later.

The crew is completing a 197-day mission.

At an October 3 change-of-command ceremony, Feustel will formally hand over command of the ISS to crewmate Alexander Gerst, KF5ONO, of the European Space Agency. Gerst, Serena Auñón-Chancellor, KG5TMT, and Sergey Prokopyev will hold down the fort for a week until for one week until Nick Hague, KG5TMV, and Alexey Ovchinin launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a 6-hour journey to the ISS aboard the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft, to round out the five-person Expedition 57.