Cake, presents and a low-key household celebration could also be what number of senior residents image their seventieth birthday.
But NASA’s oldest serving astronaut Don Pettit grew to become a septuagenarian whereas hurtling in direction of the Earth in a spacecraft to wrap up a seven-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
A Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday, the day of Pettit’s milestone birthday.
Spending 220 days in house, Pettit and his crewmates Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner orbited the Earth 3,520 instances 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 Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan at 6:20 am (0120 GMT) after undocking from the house station simply over three hours earlier.
NASA pictures of the touchdown confirmed the small capsule parachuting right 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.
Despite trying just a little worse for put on as he was pulled from the vessel, Pettit was “doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth,” NASA stated in a press release.
He was then set to fly to the Kazakh metropolis of Karaganda earlier than boarding a NASA airplane to the company’s Johnson Space Center in Texas.
The astronauts spent their time on the ISS researching areas resembling water sanitization expertise, plant progress in numerous situations 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 had been testing suffered technical points and was deemed unfit to fly them again to Earth.
Source: www.anews.com.tr