Washington, United States:
Cake, gifts and a withheld family celebration can be how many seniors can imagine their 70th birthday.
But Nasa's oldest serving astronaut Don Pettit became a Septuagenarian while he ran to the earth in a spacecraft to complete a seven -month mission on board the International Space Station (ISS).
A Soyuz capsule with the American and two Russian Kosmonauts landed on Sunday in Kazakhstan, the day of Pettit's milestone birthday.
“Today at 0420 Moscow Time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 Landing Craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit on board the Kazakh city of Zhezkazgan,” said Roscosmos of Russia.
Pettit and his crew members Ovchinin and Vagner spent 220 days in space, made the earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3 million miles in the course of their mission.
It was the fourth space travel for Pettit, which during his 29-year career registered for more than 18 months in the job around the earth.
The trio landed in a remote area southeast of Kazakhstan after a little more than three hours earlier to work out of the space station.
NASA images of the landing showed the small capsule that parachuted on the earth with the sunrise as a background.
The astronauts gave up thumb while rescuers wore them from the spacecraft to an inflatable medical tent.
Although he looked a bit worse for wear when he was pulled out of the ship, Pettit “did well and in the reach of what is expected for him after returning to Earth,” Nasa said in a statement.
He was then ready to fly to the Kazakh city of Karaganda before he boarded a NASA plane to the Johnson Space Center of the desk in Texas.
The astronauts spent their time on the ISS research areas such as Watersanitization technology, plant growth in various circumstances and fire behavior in micrsweerkracht, NASA said.
The seven -month journey of the trio just ran the nine months that NASA Astronauten Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are unexpectedly stuck on the orbital laboratory after the spacecraft they tested had technical problems and was considered unsuitable to fly back to the earth.
Space is one of the last areas of the cooperation between the US and Russia in the midst of an almost complete breakdown in the relations between Moscow and Washington about the conflict in Ukraine.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
