While most people spend their 70th birthday with cake and candles, Don Pettit celebrated his in zero gravity, returning to Earth from a seven-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Homecoming from the Stars
Don Pettit, the oldest active astronaut at NASA, came down Sunday in Kazakhstan, Russian cosmonauts Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, in a Soyuz capsule.
“Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft… landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan,” announced Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency.
The trio had spent 220 days in orbit, completed 3,520 orbits, and covered more than 93.3 million miles, a trip which was the fourth for Pettit.
A Long Ride in Space
In total, Don Pettit has spent more than 18 months in orbit during his nearly three-decade-long NASA career. Images from the landing show the capsule drifting down with parachutes at sunrise, and Pettit being helped out of the spacecraft.
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Despite showing signs of fatigue, NASA confirmed Pettit was “doing well and in the range of what is expected” after such a mission.
From the landing site, he was flown to Karaganda, then on to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where he will begin recovery.
Not Just Floating Around
While aboard the ISS, the crew conducted experiments on:
- Water sanitization
- Plant growth in microgravity
- How fire behaves in space
Their work contributes to making future deep space missions safer and more sustainable.
Still Working Together… in Space
In spite of increased political tensions between the U.S. and Russia, particularly during the Ukraine war, space is one of the few domains where the two countries still cooperate.
Pettit’s seven-month stay terminated just shy of the nine-month residence of colleagues Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were stuck aboard the ISS with technical problems involving their spacecraft.
