Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has announced his retirement after a five-month mission to space that captivated the world with his Twitter microblog.
"It has been an incredible adventure," Hadfield, 53, said of his 35 years of service as a cold war fighter pilot and astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency.
Describing his recent mission to the International Space Station as "a kind of pinnacle of my entire career ... since I was a little dreaming kid of nine years old thinking of flying in space", he said it was time for him to do something else.
"In about a month I'll be retiring from the Canadian Space Agency and just pursuing private interests," Hadfield told a press conference, "and getting my feet planted on the soil and seeing where the future takes me."
Hadfield returned to earth last month with American astronaut Tom Marshburn and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko.
From space, Hadfield captured the public imagination with regular updates on Twitter that gave an unprecedented insight into daily life in space and access to spectacular images taken from the ISS.