by The oldest astronaut in NASA turned 70 when he returned to earth after a seven -month mission in space.
Don Pettit landed in Kazakhstan in the early hours of his milestone birthday and marked the end of his 1960s and his mission on board the International Space Station (ISS).
A sojut capsule with American Mr. Pettit, and two Russian cosmonauts landed on Sunday morning, hours after the ISS was switched off.
“Today around 0420 Moscow Zeit (0120 GMT) the Sojuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit on board the Kazakh city of Zhezkazgan,” said the Russia’s Roscosmos Space Agency.
Space remains a rare cooperation between Russia and the United States, the relationship of which collapsed in February 2022.
Mr. Pettit and his crew colleagues, Mr. Ovchinin and Mr. Vagner, spent 220 days in space, around the earth 3,520 times and completed a trip of 93.3 million miles in the course of her mission.
It was the fourth space flight in Pettits, and the Astronaut had now registered in orbit for more than 18 months during his 29-year career.
Although Mr. Pettit became 70 when the mission ended, he is not the oldest person who flies in orbit. In 1998 the late John Glenn flew with a NASA mission at the age of 77.
Pictures of the landing published by the NASA showed the small capsule parachute jumpers with the sunrise as a background on the earth.
The trio landed in a remote area in Kazakhstan at 6:20 a.m. local time after it had cordoned off the space station a little more than three hours earlier.
A picture showed a frail Mr. Pettit, which gave a thumb up when he was worn in his white space suit after Earth in a medical tent.
NASA said Mr. Pettit was “good and in the area of what is expected for him after returning to Earth”.
It is expected that he is traveling to the Kazakh city of Karaganda and refers for some time to reorganize gravity before he rose to a NASA aircraft for the Johnson Space Center of the agency in Texas.
In the meantime, Mr. Ovchinin and Mr. Vagner will go to Russia’s space training in Zvyozdniy Gorodok (Star City) near Moscow.
Mr. Pettit spent his time with the ISS research work for water supply technology, 3D printing skills, plant growth under different conditions and fire behavior in microgravity, said NASA.
His time on the ISS was largely overlapped with US astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sununi Williams, who were “stranded” in space for nine months after the Boeing spaceship that they tested, had suffered technical problems and was not considered unable to fly back to earth.
In June last year, the astronauts rose to a Boeing Starliner for an eight -day mission to the space station, but their return date was repeatedly pushed back after the shuttles’ engines had encountered problems.
Last month after 278 days for the ISS from the Gulf of Florida on board a SpaceX kite capsule.
Her lengthy stay became a political lightning point, with Donald Trump and Elon Musk blame for former President Joe Biden for political reasons.
Mr. Wilmore and Ms. Williams, whose first eight-day mission of delays was, said last month that they would return to space in the Boeing aircraft.
“We will fix all the problems we have come across. We will fix it, we will get it up,” said Wilmore.
“This is a hard business,” he added. “The analogy over it is always a curvy road. It is never direct in this shop.”
