NASA’s oldest serving astronaut, Don Pettit, returned to Earth after wrapping up a seven-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
A Soyuz capsule carrying Pettit and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan on April 20, the day of his 70th birthday.
“Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan,” Russia’s space agency Roscosmos stated.
Over the course of their 220-day mission, Pettit and his crewmates Ovchinin and Vagner traveled 93.3 million miles and made 3,520 orbits around the Earth.
During his 29-year career, Pettit has spent more than 18 months in orbit, making this his fourth trip.
Just over three hours after disembarking from the space station, the three landed in a secluded region southeast of Kazakhstan.
With the sunrise in the background, NASA photos of the landing showed the tiny capsule parachuting to Earth.
As rescuers transported the astronauts from the spaceship to an inflatable medical tent, they gestured with their thumbs up.
According to a statement by NASA, Pettit was “doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth” even if he appeared a little worse for wear when he was dragged from the vessel.
He was then scheduled to take a jet to Karaganda, Kazakhstan, and then board a NASA aircraft to the Johnson Space Center in Texas.
NASA stated that during their stay on the ISS, the astronauts conducted study on topics like fire behavior in microgravity, plant growth under different conditions, and water sanitization technologies.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams unexpectedly spent nine months stranded on the orbital lab when the spacecraft they were testing experienced technical problems and was determined unsuitable to return them to Earth. The trio’s seven-month journey was only a little less than that situation.
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