The SpaceX Dragon supply spacecraft is set to leave the International Space Station and return to Earth on Monday and three new crew members are also scheduled to arrive at the ISS next week.

The three Expedition 35 crew members currently aboard the ISS are now preparing for the departure of Dragon, which arrived at the orbiting space lab in early March after a brief delay due to a thruster issue during launch which was fixed by SpaceX and NASA engineers.

The ISS multinational station mission management team met Thursday to discuss Dragon's release from the ISS's Harmony module to which it's been docked for the past three weeks and greenlighted Monday as the go date, according to NASA.

Coverage of the SpaceX capsule's release from the ISS on NASA TV will begin at 5 a.m. Eastern on Monday, the space agency reported. Officials expect Dragon to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California at around 1:20 p.m. Eastern.

The private spaceflight company's unmanned capsule brought 1,268 pounds of supplies to the ISS crew and will return with about 2,668 pounds of cargo, including the results of experiments that tested how life in microgravity affected the growth of plant seedlings, changes to the human body, the behavior of semiconductors and detergents, and more.

Expedition 35 crew members Commander Chris Hadfield, Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn, and Flight Engineer Roman Romanenko continued to work on those and other experiments this week, NASA reported. Hadfield and Marshburn have also been loading Dragon with cargo for its return flight.

All three crew members are also getting ready to welcome the members of Expedition 36Pavel Vinogradov, Chris Cassidy, and Alexander Misurkinwho are scheduled to arrive at the ISS aboard a Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft next week. On Wednesday, the ISS reboosted to an altitude about three miles higher than its operational altitude to prepare for the docking of the Soyuz capsule to the station's Poisk module, NASA said.

The Soyuz spacecraft is currently scheduled to launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan next Thursday. The joint Expedition 35/36 crew will share the station until Hadfield, Marshburn, and Romanenko depart sometime in May.

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