Cake, presents and a modest family celebration - that's how many seniors imagine their 70th birthday.
But NASA's oldest active astronaut Don Pettit turned 70 as he hurtled toward Earth in a spacecraft to complete a seven-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan today, April 20, the day of Petit's milestone birthday, AFP reported.
Spending 220 days in space, Petit and his crewmates Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner orbited the Earth 3,520 times and traveled 93.3 million miles during their mission.
It was the fourth spaceflight for Petit, who has spent more than 18 months in orbit during his 29-year career.
The trio touched down in a remote area southeast of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan at 6:20 a.m. local time after separating from the space station a little more than three hours earlier.
NASA photos from the landing showed the small capsule parachuting toward Earth with the sunrise in the background.
The astronauts gestured with raised thumbs as rescuers carried them from the spacecraft to an inflatable medical tent.
Although he looked a little worse for wear when they pulled him from the craft, Petit "was doing well and within what was expected for him upon his return to Earth," NASA said in a statement.
He then had to fly to the Kazakh city of Karaganda before boarding a NASA plane to the agency's Johnson Space Center in Texas.
The astronauts spent their time on the ISS researching areas such as water disinfection technology, plant growth under different conditions and fire behavior in microgravity, NASA said.
The trio's seven-month trip is just slightly less than the nine months NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams unexpectedly spent stranded in the orbiting laboratory after the spacecraft they were testing developed technical problems and was deemed unfit to return them to Earth. | BGNES
