NASA’s oldest astronaut, Don Pettit, celebrated his 70th birthday while hurtling towards Earth in a spacecraft as he returned the Earth following a seven-month mission onboard the International Space Station (ISS).

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American astronaut Pettit, along with two Russian cosmonauts, landed in a Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan on Sunday (Apr 20).

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“Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan,” Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said.

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‘Doing well’

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Pettit, Ovchinin and Vagner completed a journey of 93.3 million miles and orbited the Earth 3,520 times during their 220-day mission in space.

This was the fourth space flight for Pettit, who has spent more than 18 months in space during his career of 29 years. 

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The astronauts touched down in a remote region south-east of Zhezkazgan in Kazakhstan after undocking from the space station around three hours earlier. The images shared by NASA showed the small capsule parachuting down to Earth as the sun rises. The astronauts gave thumbs up as they were carried out of the spacecraft by rescuers.

In a statement, NASA said that Pettit was “doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth.”

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After flying to the Kazakh city of Karaganda, the NASA astronaut boarded a plane to the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Texas.

Aboard the International Space Station, the astronauts spent their time researching various areas like water sanitisation technology, plant growth under various conditions and fire behaviour in microgravity, NASA said.