Cake, gifts and a quiet celebration at home may have been the traditional image of a 70th birthday, yet the oldest serving astronaut at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Don Pettit, marked his milestone while descending towards Earth inside a spacecraft.
A Soyuz capsule, which carried Pettit alongside Russian cosmonauts Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, touched down in Kazakhstan on Sunday—coinciding with Pettit's 70th birthday.
The team concluded a seven-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS), during which they spent 220 days in orbit. Over the course of the mission, the crew orbited Earth 3,520 times and travelled a total of 93.3 million miles.
From NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas, astronaut Pettit said, “This birthday felt like no other. I could not have imagined spending it any closer to the stars.”
The spacecraft landed in a remote area southeast of Dzhezkazgan at 6:20 a.m. local time (0120 GMT), having undocked from the ISS slightly more than three hours prior.
This journey marked the fourth spaceflight for Pettit, who has accumulated over 18 months in space throughout his 29-year career.
Photographs released by NASA depicted the capsule descending beneath parachutes against the backdrop of a golden sunrise. Upon landing, the three astronauts raised their thumbs in approval while recovery teams carried them to a nearby inflatable medical tent.
Despite appearing fatigued, Pettit was “doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth,” NASA said in an official statement.
He was then scheduled to travel to the Kazakh city of Karaganda before boarding a NASA aircraft en route to the Johnson Space Center in Texas.
According to NASA, during their time aboard the ISS, the crew focused their research on several key areas including fire behaviour in microgravity, water sanitisation technology and plant growth under various environmental conditions.
The seven-month mission nearly matched the duration of a recent nine-month stay by NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who remained on the orbital laboratory due to technical faults in their return spacecraft.
