After five and a half months in space, three astronauts are homeward bound tonight.

Williams and his Russian crewmates arrived at the space station on March 18 and have been very busy maintaining hundreds of scientific experiments and undertaking multiple spacewalks over the course of their six-month stay.

Williams returns to Earth with a career total of 534 days in orbit - more time than any other astronaut in USA history - and 14th in the world. If all goes according to plan, the crew is expected to land southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 9:14 p.m. EDT (0114 GMT Sept. 7).

Upon preparing to leave the station, Williams tweeted out a photo bidding farewell. Since then, he has also been a flight engineer on Expedition 13 and Expedition 21.

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It will be the fourth splashdown for Expedition 48 Cmdr.

Nasa astronaut Jeff Williams and cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos undocked from the International Space Station at 5.51pm EDT yesterday to begin their trip home.

Before leaving the station, Williams turned over command of the $100 billion outpost, a project of 15 nations, to cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin, who remains aboard the station with NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Japan's Takuya Onishi.

In a second spacewalk, the two NASA astronauts retracted a thermal radiator that was no longer in use, installed two new high definition cameras to the ISS, and performed other maintenance tasks.