Nasa’s oldest astronaut returns to Earth on 70th birthday

Cake, gifts and a low-key family celebration may be how many senior citizens picture their 70th birthday.

But Nasa's oldest serving astronaut Don Pettit became a septuagenarian while hurtling towards the Earth in a spacecraft to wrap up a seven-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

A Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan yesterday, the day of Pettit's milestone birthday.

"Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan," Russia's space agency Roscosmos said.

Spending 220 days in space, Pettit and his crewmates Ovchinin and Vagner orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3 million miles over the course of their mission.

It was the fourth spaceflight for Pettit, who has logged more than 18 months in orbit throughout his 29-year career.

The trio touched down in a remote area southeast of Kazakhstan after undocking from the space station just over three hours earlier.

Nasa images of the landing showed the small capsule parachuting down to Earth with the sunrise as a backdrop.

The astronauts gave thumbs-up gestures as rescuers carried them from the spacecraft to an inflatable medical tent.