NASA's oldest astronaut returns

WASHINGTON: A Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday, the day of Pettit's milestone birthday. "Today at 0420 Moscow time, the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan," Russia's space agency Roscosmos said. Spending 220 days in space, Pettit and his crewmates Ovchinin and Vagner orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3 million miles over the course of their mission. NASA images of the landing showed the small capsule parachuting down to Earth with the sunrise as a backdrop. The astronauts gave thumbs-up gestures as rescuers carried them from the spacecraft to an inflatable medical tent. Despite looking a little worse for wear as he was pulled from the vessel, Pettit was "doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth," NASA said in a statement. — AFP