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), AFP reported.

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

Spending 220 days in space, Pettit and his crewmates Alexei 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, accordign to AFP.

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