Don Petit, currently the oldest American astronaut, returned from space just in time for his 70th birthday.
The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft, in which Petit was with Russian colleagues Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, landed on April 20.
The capsule landed safely in the Kazakh steppe with the help of a parachute at 06:20 local time.
They spent 220 days on the International Space Station and orbited Earth 3.520 times, according to the US space agency NASA.
This was Petit's fourth mission, and he has spent a total of 590 days in space so far.
However, the oldest astronaut to fly into orbit was American John Glenn.
Glenn was 77 years old when he was a member of the NASA mission in 1988.
He died almost three decades later - in 2016.
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Don Petit and the Russian cosmonauts will undergo a period of adjustment to gravity.
After adaptation, Petit will be transferred to Houston, Texas.
This 70-year-old was born in the US state of Oregon on April 20, 1955.
Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner will go to Russia's main space training base - Zvyozdany Gradok (Star City) near Moscow.
Ahead of their departure for the International Space Station, the crew entrusted command of the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft to Takuya Onishi, a Japanese astronaut.
In mid-March, NASA astronauts Barry 'Butch' Wilmore and Sunita 'Sunny' Williams returned to Earth after more than nine months conducted on the International Space Station (ISS).
Their saga began in June 2024.
The original plan was to be in orbit for only eight days, but their spacecraft broke down.
They participated in the first crewed test flight of the Starliner spacecraft, developed by aerospace company Boeing.
But the capsule suffered several technical problems during the journey to the space station, and it was deemed too risky for the astronauts to return home.
See how the longest stay on the International Space Station ended
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