Expedition 26

Expedition 26 was a 2010-2011 International Space Station resident increment commanded by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly. The expedition began when Soyuz TMA-19 departed on November 26, 2010, leaving Kelly, Aleksandr Kaleri, and Oleg Skripochka aboard the station from the Soyuz TMA-01M crew. Soyuz TMA-20 arrived in December with Dmitri Kondratiyev, Paolo Nespoli, and Catherine Coleman, restoring six-person operations. The crew supported a busy research and logistics period that included Japanese HTV-2, Russian Progress flights, ESA's Johannes Kepler ATV, and STS-133, Discovery's final Shuttle mission. Kondratiyev and Skripochka performed two Russian-segment EVAs during the increment, completing external communications hardware work, installing a Rassvet camera, retrieving experiments, and deploying ARISSat-1. Expedition 26 ended when Kelly, Kaleri, and Skripochka returned to Earth on Soyuz TMA-01M, while Kondratiyev, Coleman, and Nespoli continued into Expedition 27.