NewzVille Desk
NASA astronaut Don Pettit, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, departed the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft will return to Earth today.
Pettit, Ovchinin, and Vagner will undock from the orbiting laboratory’s Rassvet module at 5:57 p.m. EDT, heading for a parachute-assisted landing at 9:20 p.m. (6:20 a.m. Kazakhstan time, Sunday, April 20) on the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan. The day coincides with Pettit’s 70th birthday.
Don Pettit shared an emotional statement in X saying :
The feeling of being home is directly proportional to how far you have traveled. When going out to dinner, you feel home when pulling into the driveway. When touring about for a Sunday drive, you feel home when entering the outskirts of your town. When driving across the United States, perhaps on one of those memorable family vacations, you get a feeling of being home when you cross your state line (be sure to stop and take a family photo). When flying international, you feel home the first place your airplane returns to US soil. You may be 2000 miles from home, but you say to yourself, I am home. After having been on Space Station for seven months, we will be returning on our Soyuz spacecraft landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan. When our capsule goes thump on those desert flats, I will be literally on the opposite side of Earth, nearly 12000 miles from home. Yet I will be home. I can picture sometime in the future, a crew returning from Mars and after inserting themselves into low Earth orbit, they will look down at this blue jewel circling below and say, “I am Home”.
Ovchinin will hand over station command to JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi for Expedition 73, which begins at the time of undocking.
Spanning 220 days in space, Pettit and his crewmates will have orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3 million miles over the course of their mission. The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft launched and docked to the station on 11 September, 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.
After returning to Earth, the three crew members will fly on a helicopter from the landing site to the recovery staging city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Pettit will board a NASA plane and return to Houston, while Ovchinin and Vagner will depart for a training base in Star City, Russia.
