While a 70th birthday might typically involve cake, gifts, and a quiet celebration at home, the oldest serving astronaut at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Don Pettit, celebrated his milestone while descending towards Earth inside a spacecraft.
A Soyuz capsule, carrying Pettit along with 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. Throughout 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 remarked, “This birthday felt truly unique. I couldn’t 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 just over three hours prior.
This journey marked the fourth spaceflight for Pettit, who has accumulated more than 18 months in space during his 29-year career.
Photographs released by NASA showed the capsule descending beneath parachutes against the backdrop of a golden sunrise. Upon landing, the three astronauts gave thumbs-up gestures while recovery teams assisted them to a nearby inflatable medical tent.
Despite appearing tired, Pettit was “doing well and within the expected range following his return to Earth,” NASA stated in an official release.
He was then scheduled to travel to the Kazakh city of Karaganda before boarding a NASA aircraft headed to the Johnson Space Center in Texas.
According to NASA, during their time on the ISS, the crew concentrated their research on several key areas, including fire behavior in microgravity, water sanitization technology, and plant growth under various environmental conditions.
The seven-month mission closely mirrored 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 issues with their return spacecraft.
