21-04-2025
- Science
- The Herald Scotland
Astronaut lands at Scottish airport hours after return to Earth
Roscosmos said the parachute-assisted landing on the Kazakh steppe near the city of Zhezkazgan was a trouble-free descent.
The three men returned after spending 220 days in space and orbiting the Earth 3,520 times, NASA said in a statement.
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The agency noted that, coincidentally, Mr Pettit celebrated his 70th birthday on Sunday.
Nasa said it followed its routine postlanding medical checks, before the crew returned to the recovery staging area in Karaganda, Kazakhstan.
Pettit then boarded a NASA plane bound for Nasa's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, while Roscosmos said Ovchinin and Vagner departed for a training base in Star City, Russia.
Flight tracking data showed that the plane carrying Mr Pettit - NASA5 - landed at Glasgow Prestwick Airport at around 4:15pm on Sunday after a seven-hour 50 minute flight from Karaganda, Kazakhstan.
NASA5 - N95NA - AD337B
NASA Gulfstream V en route to Prestwick from Karaganda, Kazakhstan. — Pierre Davide Borrelli (@PierreDavideB) April 20, 2025
The plane - a Gulfstream V jet - then departed Prestwick at around 6:35pm on Sunday bound for Houston, where it landed at around 10pm local time after a nine-hour 20 minute flight.
NASA5 is used for both space missions and Earth science research, often in remote locations. The aircraft is a long-range business jet that supports various NASA programmes, including the International Space Station (ISS) Program and the NASA Earth Sciences Division (ESD).
In 2018, NASA astronauts Joe Acaba and Mark Vande Hei also touched down at Prestwick from Kazakhstan en route to Houston.
The pair had spent After 168 days aboard the International Space Station and before returning to Earth alongside Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin.
Since NASA ended its space shuttle program in 2011, American astronauts have been hitching a ride with Russian cosmonauts to get to the International Space Station and back again.
The space station has been continuously occupied since November 2000. An international crew of seven people live and work while traveling at a speed of five miles per second, orbiting Earth about every 90 minutes. Sometimes more are aboard the station during a crew handover.
