For many senior citizens, celebrating their 70th birthday may involve a simple family gathering with cake and gifts, but Nasa’s oldest serving astronaut, Don Pettit, marked this milestone in a truly astounding way. He turned 70 while on a mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS), hurtling towards Earth in a spacecraft.
Pettit, along with two Russian cosmonauts, arrived back on Earth in a Soyuz capsule, landing in Kazakhstan on the day of his birthday.
Over the course of their mission, Pettit and his crewmates, Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, spent 220 days in space and completed an orbit of the Earth 3,520 times, covering a distance of 93.3m miles.
This spaceflight marked the fourth for Pettit, who has accumulated more than 18 months of orbital time during his 29-year career at Nasa.
On Sunday, they landed in a remote area south-east of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan at 6:20am (0120 GMT), just over three hours after undocking from the space station.
Nasa shared images of the landing, showing the Soyuz capsule descending on a parachute with the sunrise in the background. The astronauts gave thumbs-up gestures as they were carried from the spacecraft to an inflatable medical tent.
According to Nasa, Pettit was reported to be “doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth”.
He was originally scheduled to travel to the Kazakh city of Karaganda and then board a Nasa plane to the Johnson Space Center in Texas.
During their time on the ISS, the astronauts conducted vital research focusing on water sanitisation technology, plant growth in various conditions, and fire behaviour in microgravity, Nasa reported.
Although their mission lasted seven months, it fell just short of the nine months that Nasa astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams unexpectedly spent on the orbital lab due to technical issues with their spacecraft that made it unfit for their return trip.
