Don Pettit, America’s oldest active astronaut, has come back to Earth after a long space mission—on the day he turned 70.
He returned in a Soyuz MS-26 space capsule, along with Russian astronauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner. Their capsule landed safely with the help of parachutes in the grassy plains of Kazakhstan at 6:20 a.m. local time on Sunday.
The three astronauts spent 220 days on the International Space Station (ISS), circling Earth 3,520 times, according to NASA.
This was Pettit’s fourth mission, and with this trip, he has now spent a total of 590 days in space.
Even though Pettit is the oldest active astronaut, he’s not the oldest person to ever fly in space. That title goes to John Glenn, who was 77 when he went on a NASA mission in 1998. Glenn passed away in 2016.
Now that they’ve landed, Pettit and his crewmates will take some time to get used to gravity again. After that, Pettit will travel to Houston, Texas, while Ovchinin and Vagner will head to Russia’s main space training center near Moscow.
Before they left the ISS, the crew handed over control of the space station to Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi.
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