Veteran NASA astronaut Don Pettit marked his 70th birthday by returning to Earth after a seven-month mission aboard the International Space Station, where he participated in Expeditions 71 and 72, News.Az reports citing UPI.
Pettit is the oldest currently serving astronaut in the U.S. and has flown to space four times, logging some 590 days in orbit throughout his career. He is the second-oldest American astronaut to visit space after John Glenn's famed 1998 mission at the age of 77.
"The feeling of being home is directly proportional to how far you have traveled. When going out to dinner, you feel home when pulling into the driveway," Pettit wrote in a post on social media ahead of his return.
"When our capsule goes thump on those desert flats, I will be literally on the opposite side of Earth, nearly 12000 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.'"
Pettit on Saturday evening returned to Earth aboard a Russian Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft that landed in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, with Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner. The crew left the space station around 5:57 p.m. EDT on Saturday before landing around 6:20 a.m. Kazakhstan time on Sunday.
