The cake, gifts and a celebration of the discreet family can be the number of elderly people celebrate their 70th anniversary.
But the oldest NASA astronaut, Don Pettit, has become septuagenarian while rushing to the ground in a spaceship to conclude a seven -month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
A Soyuz capsule bearing the American cosmonauts and two Russians landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday, Petit’s birthday.
“Today, on 0420, Moscow Time (0120 GMT), the landing job of Soyuz MS-26 with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit on board A landing near the Kazakh city of Zhezkazgan,” said Roscosmos of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
Spend 220 days in space, Pettit, Ovchinin and Vagner have orbited the land 3,520 times and made a trip of 93.3 million miles during their mission.
It was the fourth space flight for Petit, which recorded more than 18 months in orbit during his 29 -year career.
The trio approached in a remote area south-east of Zhezkazgan in Kazakhstan at 6:20 am (0120 GMT) after defeating the space station just over three hours earlier.
The images of the NASA landing showed the small capsule parachuting on earth with the sunrise in the background. The astronauts gave thumbs while the rescuers transported them from the spaceship to an inflatable medical tent.
NASA said in a statement that Pettit “was fine and in the range of what is expected for him after returning to earth”.
He was then ready to fly for the Kazakh city in Karaganda before boarding a NASA plane for the Agency’s Johnson Space Center in Texas.
Astronauts have spent their time on the ISS looking for areas such as water disinfection technology, plant growth in various conditions and microgravious fire behavior, NASA said.
The seven -month trip to the trio was just below the nine months that the astronauts of NASA Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams spent unexpectedly on the orbital laboratory after the spacecraft they tested suffered technical problems and were considered unfit to bring them back to earth.
Space is one of the last areas of American cooperation in the midst of an almost complete break in relations between Moscow and Washington on the Ukrainian conflict.
