Cakes, gifts, and modest family celebrations could be the number of seniors celebrating their 70th birthday.
However, Dom Petit, NASA’s oldest astronaut, has surged towards Earth on a spacecraft, and has become a Septure Genarian, closing off a seven-month mission on the International Space Station (ISS).
The Soyuz capsule, carrying the Americans and two Russian astronauts, landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday for Petit’s birthday.
He spent 220 days in space with Pettit and his crew, Alexei Obchinin and Ivan Wagner, monitoring the Earth 3,520 times and completing a 93.3 million miles of journey in the course of the mission.
It was Pettit’s fourth space flight, and he recorded in orbit for over 18 months in his 29-year career.
The trio dropped off the space station three hours ago and then landed at 6:20am (0120 GMT) in a remote area southeast of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan.
The NASA image of the landing showed a small capsule parachute to the Earth with sunrise as background. The astronauts gave them a thumbs up gesture as rescuers carried them from the spacecraft into an inflatable medical tent.
NASA said in a statement that Pettit “to the extent that we can expect from him once he returns to Earth.”
He then boarded a NASA plane at his Texas agency Johnson Space Center before flying to the Kazakh city of Karaganda.
Astronauts spent time in ISS research areas such as water inflammatory techniques, plant growth under various conditions, and fire behavior under microgravity, NASA said.
The trio’s seven-month trip was just part of the nine months NASA astronauts Butch Willmore and Snie Williams unexpectedly spent on the Orbital Laboratory after a spacecraft that suffered technical challenges.
