The usa’s oldest serving astronaut Dan Pettit has returned to Earth on his seventieth birthday.The Soyuz MS-26 house pill wearing Pettit and his Russian crewmates Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner made a parachute-assisted touchdown in Kazakhstan’s steppe at 06:20 native time (01:20 GMT) on Sunday.They spent 220 days on board the World Area Station (ISS), orbiting the Earth 3,520 instances, the United States house company Nasa mentioned.For Pettit – who has now spent a complete of 590 days in house – it was once his fourth undertaking. Nonetheless, he isn’t the oldest particular person to fly in orbit – that document belongs to John Glenn, who elderly 77 flew on a Nasa undertaking in 1998. He died in 2016.Pettit and the 2 Russian cosmonauts will now spend a while readjusting to gravity.After that, Pettit – who was once born in Oregon on 20 April 1955 – will probably be flown to Houston in Texas, whilst Ovchinin and Vagner will move to Russia’s primary house coaching base in Zvyozdniy Gorodok (Megastar Town) close to Moscow.Sooner than their departure from the ISS, the staff passed command of the spaceship to Jap astronaut Takuya Onishi.
