NASA Astronaut Don Pettit Returns Home to Houston | Johnson Space Center

NASA Astronaut Don Pettit Returns Home to Houston | Johnson Space Center

NASA astronaut Don Pettit has officially returned home to Houston, Texas, after completing his fourth spaceflight, totaling 590 days in space. Pettit can be seen here shortly after his plane landed at Ellington Field.

At 9:20 p.m. EDT, April 19, 2025, (6:20 a.m. Kazakhstan time, Sunday, April 20), the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft made a parachute-assisted landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of the town of Zhezkazgan.

Spanning 220 days in space, NASA astronaut Don Pettit and his crewmates, Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner of Russia, orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3 million miles over the course of their International Space Station mission. Pettit returned on his 70th birthday! The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft launched and docked to the station on Sept. 11, 2024.

This was Pettit’s fourth spaceflight, where he served as flight engineer for Expedition 71 and 72. He has a career total of 590 days in orbit. Ovchinin completed his fourth flight in space, totaling 595 days, and Vagner has earned an overall total of 416 days in space during two trips to the orbiting laboratory.

The three crew members later flew on a helicopter from the landing site to the recovery staging city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Pettit then boarded a NASA plane for his return to Houston, while Ovchinin and Vagner departed for a training center in Star City, Russia.

Image Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC)

Release Date: April 21, 2024

#NASA #Space #ISS #Science #SoyuzMS26Spacecraft #Astronauts #DonPettit #Japan #日本 #JAXA #Cosmonauts #AlexeyOvchinin #IvanVagner #Russia #Россия #Roscosmos #Роскосмос #HumanSpaceflight #SpaceLaboratory #InternationalCooperation #Expedition72 #Houston #Texas #JSC #UnitedStates #STEM #Education