America’s oldest serving astronaut Dan Pettit has returned to Earth on his seventieth birthday.
The Soyuz MS-26 area capsule carrying Pettit and his Russian crewmates Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner made a parachute-assisted touchdown in Kazakhstan’s steppe at 06:20 native time (01:20 GMT) on Sunday.
They spent 220 days on board the Worldwide Area Station (ISS), orbiting the Earth 3,520 instances, the US area company Nasa mentioned.
For Pettit – who has now spent a complete of 590 days in area – it was his fourth mission.
Nonetheless, he’s not the oldest particular person to fly in orbit – that report belongs to John Glenn, who aged 77 flew on a Nasa mission in 1998. He died in 2016.
Pettit and the 2 Russian cosmonauts will now spend a while readjusting to gravity.
After that, Pettit – who was born in Oregon on 20 April 1955 – can be flown to Houston in Texas, whereas Ovchinin and Vagner will go to Russia’s predominant area coaching base in Zvyozdniy Gorodok (Star Metropolis) close to Moscow.
Earlier than their departure from the ISS, the crew handed command of the spaceship to Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi.
