NASA’s oldest energetic astronaut returns to Earth on seventieth birthday

Worldwide House Station (ISS) crew member and NASA astronaut Don Pettit is carried to a medical tent shortly after touchdown within the Soyuz MS-26 area capsule with Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner in a distant space close to Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan April 20, 2025.
| Picture Credit score: NASA/Invoice Ingalls by way of Reuters

Cake, presents and a low-key household celebration could also be what number of senior residents image their seventieth birthday.

However Nationwide Aeronautics and House Administration (NASA)‘s oldest serving astronaut Don Pettit turned a septuagenarian whereas hurtling in the direction of the Earth in a spacecraft to wrap up a seven-month mission aboard the Worldwide House Station (ISS).

A Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday (April 20, 2025), the day of Pettit’s milestone birthday.

“At the moment at 4:20 Moscow time (1:20 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 touchdown craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed close to the Kazakh city of Zhezkazgan,” Russia’s area company Roscosmos stated.

Spending 220 days in area, Pettit and his crewmates Ovchinin and Vagner orbited the Earth 3,520 occasions and accomplished a journey of 93.3 million miles over the course of their mission.

It was the fourth spaceflight for Pettit, who has logged greater than 18 months in orbit all through his 29-year profession.

The trio touched down in a distant space southeast of Kazakhstan after undocking from the area station simply over three hours earlier.

NASA photographs of the touchdown confirmed the small capsule parachuting all the way down to Earth with the dawn as a backdrop.

The astronauts gave thumbs-up gestures as rescuers carried them from the spacecraft to an inflatable medical tent.

Regardless of wanting a bit worse for put on as he was pulled from the vessel, Pettit was “doing properly and within the vary of what’s anticipated for him following return to Earth,” NASA stated in an announcement.

He was then set to fly to the Kazakh metropolis of Karaganda earlier than boarding a NASA aircraft to the company’s Johnson House Heart in Texas.

The astronauts spent their time on the ISS researching areas akin to water sanitization expertise, plant development in varied circumstances and fireplace conduct in microgravity, NASA stated.

The trio’s seven-month journey was simply wanting the 9 months that NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams unexpectedly spent caught on the orbital lab after the spacecraft they have been testing suffered technical points and was deemed unfit to fly them again to Earth.

House is among the closing areas of U.S.-Russia cooperation amid an virtually full breakdown in relations between Moscow and Washington over the Ukraine battle.