{"id":39820,"date":"2025-04-22T01:42:11","date_gmt":"2025-04-22T01:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/39820\/"},"modified":"2025-04-22T01:42:11","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T01:42:11","slug":"nasas-oldest-astronaut-makes-detour-to-scotland-on-return-to-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/39820\/","title":{"rendered":"Nasa’s oldest astronaut makes detour to SCOTLAND on return to Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

NASA’s oldest serving astronaut made a detour to Scotland on return from his space mission.<\/p>\n

Don Pettit, 70, and his colleagues returned to Earth<\/a> in a parachute-assisted capsule landing on the weekend.<\/p>\n

\"Alamy<\/a><\/p>\n

4<\/p>\n

The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft descends by parachute for touch down\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

4<\/p>\n

It landed in a field in Kazakhstan\"Mandatory<\/a><\/p>\n

4<\/p>\n

NASA astronaut Don Pettit is carried to a medical tent after coming back to earth\"Flight<\/a><\/p>\n

4<\/p>\n

Flight tracker showed the plane made a stop at Glasgow Prestwick<\/p>\n

They spent 220 days in space and orbited the Earth 3,520 times, NASA said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But Dr Pettit also made flying visit to Scotland on his way home.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Flight tracking data showed that the plane carrying\u00a0Dr Pettit then landed at\u00a0Glasgow\u00a0Prestwick Airport<\/a> on Sunday after an eight-hour flight from\u00a0Kazakhstan.<\/p>\n

The plane then later flew on to Houston.<\/p>\n

Dr Pettit has spent more than 18 months in orbit in a 29-year NASA <\/a>career and has carried out 13 hours of spacewalks.<\/p>\n

The astronaut gave the thumbs-up as rescuers carried him from the spacecraft to an inflatable medical tent on Sunday.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Since 2011, American astronauts have been hitching rides with Russian cosmonauts to get to the International Space Station<\/a> and back again.<\/p>\n

The space station <\/a>has been continuously occupied since\u00a0November 2000.<\/p>\n

Was Blue Origin mission FAKED? Conspiracy theorists reveal ‘proof’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA’s oldest serving astronaut made a detour to Scotland on return from his space mission. Don Pettit, 70,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39821,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3844],"tags":[875,1102,918,874,70,712,5119,413,1603,16,15,49,1899],"class_list":{"0":"post-39820","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-earth","9":"tag-edinburgh","10":"tag-glasgow","11":"tag-nasa","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-section-newsscottish-news","15":"tag-space","16":"tag-spacex","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-weird-science"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114379079260578035","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39820\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}