NASA’s oldest active astronaut redefines the “home” for his birthday and landed from the International Space Station on the same day he turned 70.
Don Pettit landed on Saturday (April 19) Soyuz MS-26 crew members, 53-year-old Alexy Obchinin and Ivan Bagner, 39. Please board the same spaceship.
Pettit was born on April 20, 1955 in Silverton, Oregon, but said that the feeling of being at home was related to where you were.
“After it’s turned on [the] The space station will return to the Soyuz spacecraft landing on the Kazakhstan steppe for seven months. As our capsules pound those desert flats, I’m literally on the other side of the globe, about 12,000 miles from my home. And yet I’m still at home,” Pettit said. I wrote it while he was still in space Friday (April 18th).
“I can imagine a crew returning from Mars in the future, and after inserting themselves into low Earth orbit, they look down at this blue gem below and say, ‘I’m home,'” he writes.
Pettit’s journey wasn’t as long or far as a trip to Red Planet, but it was fascinating to many who followed his “science of opportunity” demonstrations and stunning photographs of Earth and other sights of space.
“Today I say goodbye to Dom Petitt,” wrote Nicole Ayers, a NASA astronaut and expedition 73 flight engineer. Social Media Network x Saturday. “It’s bittersweet because he had a great mission and inspired so many people while he was here.”
Pettit, Ovchinin, and Vagner’s Trip Home began Saturday at 5:57pm EDT (2157 GMT). Almost two and a half hours later, the vehicle burned its eyes, stripped off its tracks and propulsion modules, leaving only a gumdrop-shaped descent capsule, bringing the three crew back home.
The ones remaining in orbit are Ayers and fellow NASA astronaut Anne McLain. Johnny Kim;Jaksa (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut and 73rd expedition commander Takuyaonishi. Astronauts Kiril Peskov, Sergei Rizikov, and Alexei Zubritsky of Roscosmos, a Russian Federation corporation.
On Earth, the Soyuz MS-26 and its crew met Russian recovery forces and NASA health workers to receive a quick check from the capsule before flying by helicopter to the staging city near Karaganda, Kazakhstan. From there, Pettit returns to Houston on a NASA plane, with Obchinin and Bagner set out for the training base of Russia’s Star City.
In addition to Pettit’s personal science demonstrations, Zero – Drink from G cup He designed his previous visit to the station and imaging thin wafers of ice under polarizing filters. He also helped him test hundreds of experiments and techniques during his time as a crew member on the expedition 71/72.
Pettit also helped oversee the arrival of 10 crew members on the Dragon spaceship “Freedom” and Dragon “Endurance”, and the departure of SpaceX’s crew members 9 mission along with the departure of the Cygnus “SS Francis R. “Dick” Scobby “Scoby” cargo ship.
Ovchinin and Vagner also participated in science experiments, running space for seven hours and 17 minutes, and installing an X-ray spectrometer outside the Zvezda service module. They were also in space for the arrival of the Soyuz MS-28 crew and the ongoing space for the MS-29 and MS-30 cargo ships, as well as the departure of the MS-27 and MS-28.
This was Petitt and Obchinin’s fourth space flight and Vagner’s second space flight. After landing on Saturday, Pettit’s total space career time is 590 days. Ovchinin has a vagner in 595 days and 416 days on track.
The Soyuz MS-26 was Russia’s 72nd Soyuz, since 2000, to be launched on the International Space Station to fly the 155th since 1967.
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