Expedition 44 Hands Over the Space Station to Expedition 4504:33

The reins of the International Space Station were passed from Gennady Padalka of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) to NASA’s Scott Kelly during a ceremony on the orbital outpost on Sept. 5. Padalka will return to Earth Sept. 12, Kazakh time, in the Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft with visiting crew members Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency and Aidyn Aimbetov of the Kazakh Space Agency (Kazcosmos), who arrived in a fresh Soyuz spacecraft on Sept. 4 with cosmonaut Sergey Volkov. Kelly, who will be the station commander for Expeditions 45 and 46, and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos, are nearing the halfway mark of a year-long mission on the complex, gathering valuable biomedical data that will be used in the planning for a mission to Mars.