Donald Pettit
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| Donald Roy Pettit | |
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| NASA Astronaut | |
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| Born | April 20, 1955 Silverton, Oregon |
| Other occupation | Chemical Engineer |
| Time in space | 176d 21h 44m 15s |
| Selection | 1996 NASA Group |
| Missions | STS-113, Expedition 6, Soyuz TMA-1, STS-126 |
| Mission insignia |  .png){kind=small}  |
Donald Roy Pettit (born April 20, 1955) is an American chemical engineer and a NASA astronaut. He is a veteran of a six-month stay aboard the International Space Station and a six-week expedition to find meteorites in Antarctica.
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[edit] Personal
Pettit was raised in Silverton, Oregon and is an Eagle Scout.[1] He earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Oregon State University in 1978 and a doctoral degree from the University of Arizona in 1983. He worked as a scientist as the Los Alamos National Laboratory until 1996, when he was selected as an astronaut candidate. He is married and has two sons.
[edit] International Space Station
Pettit's first space mission was as a mission specialist on ISS Expedition 6 in 2002 and 2003. During his six-month stay aboard the space station, he performed two EVAs to help install external scientific equipment. Throughout his stay on the International Space Station during his free time he filmed numerous experiments he conducted on free spheres of water in an extremely-low gravity environment in a series he called "Saturday Morning Science".
In addition in November 2008 he invented a zero-g coffee cup, which used the wetting angle to carry the coffee along a crease so as to permit drinking, and avoid the necessity of a straw. This zero-g cup was featured in the May 2009 National Geographic Magazine issue, along with his notes on the relation of the internal cup angle to the contact wetting angle for various construction materials.
Pettit was mission specialist 1 on the STS-126 mission to deliver equipment and supplies to the ISS. He spent 15 days 20 hours 29 minutes and 37 seconds on board Endeavour.
[edit] Antarctica
From November 2006 through January 2007, Pettit joined the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET), spending six weeks in the Antarctic summer collecting meteorite samples,[2] including a lunar meteorite. During the expedition, he was called on to perform emergency electrical repairs to a snowmobile and emergency dental surgery. Periods of tent-confining inclement weather were spent continuing his Saturday Morning Science series—"on Ice"—with photographic surveys of crystal sizes of glacial ice samples and collections of magnetic micrometeorites from ice melt used for cooking water. (He estimated Antarctic glacial ice to contain roughly 1 micrometeorite per liter.)
Pettit was able to keep up his hobby of didgeridoo-playing by constructing a didgeridoo of ice, with a mouthpiece of butter.
[edit] References
- ^ "Astronauts and the BSA". Fact sheet. Boy Scouts of America. http://www.scouting.org/Media/FactSheets/02-558.aspx. Retrieved on 2006-09-06.
- ^ "Don Pettit Goes to Antarctica". 2006-12-11. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/11dec_donpettit.htm. Retrieved on 2007-09-21.
- "Handyman to Return to His Space Workshop". http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/science/space/14pettit.html.
[edit] External links
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