After returning to Earth, NASA’s oldest astronaut made a detour to Scotland.
Don Pettit being carried to a medical tent (Image: NASA/AFP via Getty Images)
NASA’s oldest astronaut landed at a Scots airport, hours after returning to Earth at the weekend.
After a seven month research assignment at the International Space Station, a Soyuz capsule carrying astronaut Don Pettit and Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday. The parachute-assisted landing on the Kazakh steppe near the city of Zhezkazgan was a trouble-free descent, according to Roscosmos.
They spent 220 days in space and orbited the Earth 3,520 times, NASA said in a statement, with the return coinciding with Dr Pettit celebrating his 70th birthday on Sunday.
Dr Petit then boarded a plane bound for NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, after NASA followed its routine postlanding medical checks, before the crew returned to the recovery staging area in Karaganda, Kazakhstan.
The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft lands in a remote area with Expedition 72 NASA astronaut Don Pettit, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner aboard(Image: Getty Images)
Flight tracking data showed that the plane carrying Dr Pettit – NASA5 – landed at Glasgow Prestwick Airport at around 4:15pm on Sunday after a seven-hour 50 minute flight from Karaganda, Kazakhstan, reports the Herald.
The Gulfstream V jet then left Prestwick at around 6:35pm on Sunday bound for Houston, where it landed at around 10pm local time after a nine-hour 20 minute flight.
The plane stopped off at Prestwick Airport(Image: X/PierreDavideB)
Pettit has spent over 18 months in orbit during his 29-year NASA – carrying out 13 hours of spacewalks. Upon landing, he gave a thumbs-up while he was carried from the spacecraft by rescuers to an inflatable medical tent on Sunday.
NASA has said that he was ‘”doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth“.
NASA astronauts Joe Acaba and Mark Vande Hei also touched down at Prestwick from Kazakhstan in 2018 en route to Houston. Both had spent 168 days aboard the International Space Station before returning to Earth alongside Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin.
American astronauts have been hitching a ride with Russian cosmonauts to get to the International Space Station and back again since NASA ended its space shuttle program in 2011.
Since November 2000, the space station has been continuously occupied. While traveling at a speed of five miles per second, orbiting Earth about every 90 minutes, an international crew of seven people live and work on it. Although, sometimes more are aboard the station during a crew handover.
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