NASA’s oldest energetic astronaut has redefined touring “dwelling” 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) together 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 same spacecraft.
Pettit was born on April 20, 1955, in Silverton, Oregon, however stated that the sensation of being house is relative to the place you may have been.
“After having been on [the] house 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 aspect of Earth, almost 12,000 miles from dwelling. But I will likely be dwelling,” Pettit wrote while he was still in space 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’ll look down at this blue jewel circling beneath and say, ‘I’m dwelling,'” 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 gorgeous images of Earth and different sights in house, it was no much less participating.
“Saying goodbye right this moment to Don Pettit,” wrote NASA astronaut and Expedition 73 flight engineer Nichole Ayers on the social media network 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 dwelling 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. Nearly two and half hours later, the car carried out a deorbit burn and shed its orbital and propulsion modules, leaving simply its gumdrop-shaped descent capsule to convey the three crewmates again dwelling.
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 have been met by Russian restoration forces and NASA medical personnel to be helped out of the capsule and bear fast checks earlier than flying on a helicopter to the close by staging metropolis of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. From there, Pettit will board a NASA airplane 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 drinking from a zero-g cup that he designed on a earlier go to to the station and imaging skinny wafers of ice below 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 nicely and performed a 7 hour, 17 minute spacewalk to put in an X-ray spectrometer on the outside of the Zvezda service module. In addition they have been in house 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 whole time in house 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 a hundred and fifty fifth to fly since 1967. Throughout its 220 days in house, it traveled 93.3 million miles (150.2 million km) whereas circling Earth 3,520 occasions.
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