Skygazers could spot Nasa’s Crew-4 mission reentering over the US southeast today

The Crew-4 mission will blaze a path from Iowa through Georgia on its Friday afternoon return to Earth

The astronauts of Nasa’s Crew-4 mission to the ISS, Jessica Watkins, Robert hines, Kjell Lindgren and ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti (Nasa)

Nasa’s Crew-4 mission is slated to splash down off the Florida coast around 4.55pm EDT Friday afternoon, and alert sky watchers from Iowa through George may catch a glimpse of the Spacecraft as it blazes a trail across the sky during reentry.

The four astronauts of the Crew-4 mission have been on the International Space Station since April, and departed from the space station Friday morning in their SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. That spacecraft will settle into the Atlantic Ocean off the north Florida coast using parachutes after bleeding off the majority of its orbital speed as heat while reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, protected by the spacecraft’s heat shielding.

The Crew-4 mission reentry flight path will be visible for some viewers in Iowa and Nebraska beginning around 4.43pm EDT, visible between 30 and 90 degrees of the horizon, depending on how close an observer is to the flight line, according to a Nasa post to the social media website Twitter.

The flight path will continue over Illinois by 4.44pm EDT, reach Kentucky by 4.45pm EDT, cross Tennessee and reach the border with George by around 3.46pm EDT.

The spacecraft will pass over George and fly out over the ocean by 3.48pm EDT.

For those out of the flight path or those who miss it, Nasa is covering the return mission live on the space agency’s live events website.

The Crew-4 astronauts, Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, and Jessica Watkins, of Nasa, along with Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency, launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on 27 April, and have spent the past months conducting science experiments aboard the space station. They shared room on the space station with their successors for about two weeks, the astronauts and cosmonaut of the Cew-5 mission having launched on 5 October.

The Crew-5 astronauts, Nasa astronauts Nicole Mann — the first Native American woman astronaut —  and Josh Cassada, Japanese Space Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata, and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina, will spend about six months on the space station.