NASA’s oldest serving astronaut made a detour to Scotland on return from his space mission.
Don Pettit, 70, and his colleagues returned to Earth in a parachute-assisted capsule landing on the weekend.
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The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft descends by parachute for touch down
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It landed in a field in Kazakhstan
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NASA astronaut Don Pettit is carried to a medical tent after coming back to earth
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Flight tracker showed the plane made a stop at Glasgow Prestwick
They spent 220 days in space and orbited the Earth 3,520 times, NASA said in a statement.
But Dr Pettit also made flying visit to Scotland on his way home.
He had boarded a NASA plane bound for Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, while Russian colleagues departed for a training base in Star City, Russia.
Flight tracking data showed that the plane carrying Dr Pettit then landed at Glasgow Prestwick Airport on Sunday after an eight-hour flight from Kazakhstan.
The plane then later flew on to Houston.
Dr Pettit has spent more than 18 months in orbit in a 29-year NASA career and has carried out 13 hours of spacewalks.
The astronaut gave the thumbs-up as rescuers carried him from the spacecraft to an inflatable medical tent on Sunday.
Despite looking worse for wear, he was ‘”doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth”, NASA said.
Since 2011, American astronauts have been hitching rides with Russian cosmonauts to get to the International Space Station and back again.
The space station has been continuously occupied since November 2000.
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