19 Apr 2025

At 9:20 p.m. EDT (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 Dzhezkazgan.

Spanning 220 days in space, NASA astronaut Don Pettit and his crewmates, Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, 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 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 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.

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The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft descends to a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan just over three hours after undocking from the International Space Station.