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America’s oldest serving astronaut Dan Pettit has returned to Earth on his 70th birthday.<\/p>\n
The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft carrying Pettit and his Russian crewmates Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner made a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan’s steppe at 06:20 local time (01:20 GMT) on Sunday.<\/p>\n
They spent 220 days on board the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting the Earth 3,520 times, the US space agency Nasa said.<\/p>\n
For Pettit – who has now spent a total of 590 days in space – it was his fourth mission. <\/p>\n
Still, he is not the oldest person to fly in orbit – that record belongs to John Glenn, who aged 77 flew on a Nasa mission in 1998. He died in 2016.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Pettit and the two Russian cosmonauts will now spend some time readjusting to gravity.<\/p>\n
After that, Pettit – who was born in Oregon on 20 April 1955 – will be flown to Houston in Texas, while Ovchinin and Vagner will go to Russia’s main space training base in Zvyozdniy Gorodok (Star City) near Moscow.<\/p>\n
Before their departure from the ISS, the crew handed command of the spaceship to Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi.<\/p>\n
Last month, two Nasa astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, finally returned to Earth after spending more than nine months on board the ISS – instead of the initially planned just eight days.<\/p>\n
They flew to the ISS in June 2024 – but technical issues with the spacecraft they used to get to the space station meant they were only able to return to Earth on 18 March this year.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n