Astronaut Returns to Earth on seventieth Birthday with Soyuz Crew

At 9:20 p.m. EDT (6:20 a.m. Kazakhstan time, Sunday, April 20), the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft made a parachute-assisted touchdown on the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of the city of Dzhezkazgan.

Spanning 220 days in house, NASA astronaut Don Pettit and his crewmates, Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, orbited the Earth 3,520 instances and accomplished a journey of 93.3 million miles over the course of their mission. The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft launched and docked to the station on Sept. 11, 2024.

This was Pettit’s fourth spaceflight, the place he served as flight engineer for Expedition 71 and 72. He has a profession complete of 590 days in orbit. Ovchinin accomplished his fourth flight in house, totaling 595 days, and Vagner has earned an general complete of 416 days in house throughout two journeys to the orbiting laboratory.

The three crew members will fly on a helicopter from the touchdown website to the restoration staging metropolis of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Pettit will board a NASA airplane and return to Houston, whereas Ovchinin and Vagner will depart for a coaching base in Star Metropolis, Russia.

Be taught extra about station actions by following the house station weblog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on X, in addition to the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.

Get the newest from NASA delivered each week. Subscribe right here:

April 19, 2025