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).

NASA astronaut Don Pettit will return to Earth from the International Space Station Saturday, alongside his two Russian cosmonaut colleagues.

They spent 220 days on the (ISS), orbiting the Earth 3,520 times and it means Don has now spent a total of 590 days in space, over four missions. Amazingly, he is not the oldest person to fly in orbit - that record belongs to John Glenn,