NASA’s oldest lively astronaut has redefined touring “residence” on your birthday, touchdown from the Worldwide House Station on the identical day that he turned 70.
Don Pettit touched down on Saturday (April 19) along with his Soyuz MS-26 crewmates, Aleksey Ovchinin, 53, and Ivan Vagner, 39. The U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts reached the bottom in Kazakhstan at 9:20 p.m. EDT (0120 GMT or 6:20 a.m. native time April 20), seven months after they left Earth aboard the identical spacecraft.
Pettit was born on April 20, 1955, in Silverton, Oregon, however mentioned that the sensation of being house is relative to the place you’ve gotten been.
“After having been on [the] area station for seven months, we will likely be returning on our Soyuz spacecraft touchdown on the steppes of Kazakhstan. When our capsule goes thump on these desert flats, I will likely be actually on the other facet of Earth, almost 12,000 miles from residence. But I will likely be residence,” Pettit wrote whereas he was nonetheless in area on Friday (April 18).
“I can image someday sooner or later, a crew getting back from Mars and after inserting themselves into low Earth orbit, they may look down at this blue jewel circling under and say, ‘I’m residence,'” he wrote.
Pettit’s journey was not almost as lengthy or distant as a visit to the Purple Planet, however for a lot of who adopted his “science of alternative” demonstrations and his beautiful images of Earth and different sights in area, it was no much less partaking.
“Saying goodbye at present to Don Pettit,” wrote NASA astronaut and Expedition 73 flight engineer Nichole Ayers on the social media community X on Saturday. “It is bittersweet as a result of he had an incredible mission and impressed so many individuals whereas he was right here.”
Pettit, Ovchinin and Vagner’s journey residence started at 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 GMT) on Saturday, as Russia’s Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft undocked from the station’s Rassvet mini-research module. Virtually two and half hours later, the automobile carried out a deorbit burn and shed its orbital and propulsion modules, leaving simply its gumdrop-shaped descent capsule to carry the three crewmates again residence.
Remaining in orbit was Ayers, in addition to fellow NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Jonny Kim; JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Company) astronaut and Expedition 73 commander Takuya Onishi; and cosmonauts Kirill Peskov, Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky of the Russian federal company Roscosmos.
On Earth, Soyuz MS-26 and its crew had been met by Russian restoration forces and NASA medical personnel to be helped out of the capsule and endure fast checks earlier than flying on a helicopter to the close by staging metropolis of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. From there, Pettit will board a NASA aircraft and return to Houston, whereas Ovchinin and Vagner will depart for a coaching base in Star Metropolis, Russia.
Along with Pettit’s private science demos — together with ingesting from a zero-g cup that he designed on a earlier go to to the station and imaging skinny wafers of ice beneath polarized filters — he additionally helped carry out a whole lot of experiments and know-how trials throughout his time as an Expedition 71/72 crew member.
Pettit additionally helped oversee the departure of SpaceX‘s Crew-9 mission aboard the Dragon spacecraft “Freedom” and the arrival of Crew-10 on Dragon “Endurance,” in addition to the departure of the Cygnus “S.S. Francis R. ‘Dick’ Scobee” cargo ship.
Ovchinin and Vagner took half in science experiments as effectively and carried out a 7 hour, 17 minute spacewalk to put in an X-ray spectrometer on the outside of the Zvezda service module. Additionally they had been in area for the arrival of the Soyuz MS-28 crew and Progress MS-29 and MS-30 cargo ships, in addition to the departures of Progresses MS-27 and MS-28.
This was Pettit’s and Ovchinin’s fourth spaceflights and Vagner’s second. After touchdown Saturday, Pettit’s profession complete time in area is 590 days, Ovchinin has 595 days and Vagner 416 days in orbit.
Soyuz MS-26 was Russia’s 72nd Soyuz to launch for the Worldwide House Station since 2000 and one hundred and fifty fifth to fly since 1967. Throughout its 220 days in area, it traveled 93.3 million miles (150.2 million km) whereas circling Earth 3,520 occasions.
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