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Cake, gifts and a low-key family celebration may be how many senior citizens celebrate their 70th birthday.
But Nasa’s oldest serving astronaut, Don Pettit, became a septuagenarian while hurtling towards Earth in a spacecraft to wrap up a seven-month mission onboard the International Space Station (ISS).
A Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday, Pettit’s birthday.
Spending 220 days in space, Pettit and his crewmates, Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3m miles over the course of their mission.
It was the fourth spaceflight for Pettit, who has logged more than 18 months in orbit during his 29-year career.
The trio touched down in a remote area south-east of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan at 6:20am (0120 GMT) after undocking from the space station just over three hours earlier.
Nasa images of the landing showed the small capsule parachuting down to Earth with the sunrise as a backdrop. The astronauts gave thumbs-up gestures as rescuers carried them from the spacecraft to an inflatable medical tent.
Nasa said in a statement that Pettit was “doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth”.
He was then set 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 sanitisation technology, plant growth under various conditions and fire behaviour in microgravity, Nasa said.
The trio’s seven-month trip was just short of the nine months that the Nasa astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams unexpectedly spent on the orbital lab after the spacecraft they were testing suffered technical issues and was deemed unfit to fly them back to Earth.
