Astronaut Returns To Earth On 70th Birthday Aboard Soyuz MS-26, With Russian Crewmates

NASA's oldest active astronaut Don Pettit, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, traveling in Russian Soyuz MS-26 capsule, returned to Earth at 0120 UTC on April, after a 220-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Soyuz MS-26 undocked at 2157 UTC from ISS's Rassvet mini-research module. Almost two and half hours later, the vehicle performed a deorbit burn and shed its orbital and propulsion modules, leaving just its gumdrop-shaped descent capsule to bring the three crewmates back home. The spacecraft made a safe, parachute-assisted landing at 0120 UTC (April 20) in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan.

On Earth, Soyuz MS-26 and its crew were met by Russian recovery forces and NASA medical personnel to be helped out of the capsule and undergo quick checks before flying on a helicopter to the nearby staging city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. From there, Pettit will board a NASA plane and return to Houston, while Ovchinin and Vagner will depart for a training base in Star City, Russia.

Pettit, who touched down with his Soyuz MS-26 crewmates, Ovchinin, 53, and Vagner, 39, was born on April 20, 1955, in Silverton, Oregon, He landed from the space station on the same day that he turned 70, saying that the feeling of being home is relative to where you have been.

"After having been on [the] space station for seven months, we will be returning on our Soyuz spacecraft landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan," Pettit wrote while he was still in space on Friday (April 18). "When our capsule goes thump on those desert flats, I will be literally on the opposite side of Earth, nearly 12,000 miles from home. Yet I will be home.. I can picture sometime in the future, a crew returning from Mars and after inserting themselves into low Earth orbit, they will look down at this blue jewel circling below and say, 'I am home,."

"Saying goodbye today to Don Pettit," wrote NASA astronaut and Expedition 73 flight engineer Nichole Ayers on the social media network X on Saturday. "It's bittersweet because he had an amazing mission and inspired so many people while he was here."

The Soyuz MS-26 crew spent 220 days in space, orbiting the Earth 3,520 times and traveling a total of 150.2 million kilometers(km). During their mission, Pettit conducted research to enhance in-orbit metal 3D printing capabilities, advance water sanitization technologies, explore plant growth under varying water conditions, and investigate fire behavior in microgravity.

Pettit is renowned for his stunning and creative off-Earth photography, which he frequently shared with the public via social media.

In addition to Pettit's personal science demos — including drinking from a zero-g cup that he designed on a previous visit to the station and imaging thin wafers of ice under polarized filters — he also helped perform hundreds of experiments and technology trials during his time as an Expedition 71/72 crew member.

Pettit also helped oversee the departure of SpaceX's Crew-9 mission aboard the Dragon spacecraft "Freedom" and the arrival of Crew-10 on Dragon "Endurance," as well as the departure of the Cygnus "S.S. Francis R. 'Dick' Scobee" cargo ship.

Ovchinin and Vagner took part in science experiments as well and conducted a 7 hour, 17 minute spacewalk to install an X-ray spectrometer on the exterior of the Zvezda service module. They also were in space for the arrival of the Soyuz MS-28 crew and Progress MS-29 and MS-30 cargo ships, as well as the departures of Progresses MS-27 and MS-28.

This was Pettit's and Ovchinin's fourth spaceflights and Vagner's second. After landing Saturday, Pettit's career total time in space 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 ISS since 2000 and 155th to fly since 1967. The spacecraft launched and docked to the ISS on September 11, 2024.