{"id":44810,"date":"2024-10-29T18:39:30","date_gmt":"2024-10-29T10:39:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nasas-oldest-active-astronaut-is-also-one-of-the-most-curious-humans\/"},"modified":"2024-10-29T18:39:30","modified_gmt":"2024-10-29T10:39:30","slug":"nasas-oldest-active-astronaut-is-also-one-of-the-most-curious-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nasas-oldest-active-astronaut-is-also-one-of-the-most-curious-humans\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s oldest active astronaut is also one of the most curious humans"},"content":{"rendered":"

For his most recent trip to the International Space Station, in lieu of bringing coffee or some other beverage in his \u201cpersonal drink bag\u201d allotment for the stay, NASA astronaut Don Pettit asked instead for a couple of bags of unflavored gelatin.<\/p>\n

This was not for cooking purposes but rather to perform scientific experiments. How many of us would give up coffee for science?<\/p>\n

Well, Donald Roy Pettit is not like most of us.<\/p>\n

At the age of 69, Pettit is NASA\u2019s oldest active astronaut and began his third long-duration stay on the space station last month. A lifelong tinkerer and gifted science communicator, he already is performing wonders up there, and we\u2019ll get to his current activities in a moment. But just so you understand who we\u2019re dealing with, the thing to know about Pettit is that he is insatiably curious and wants to share the wonder of science and the natural world with others.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s just one small example. During his last six-month increment in orbit, from late 2011 to the middle of 2012, Pettit had some Lego blocks he\u2019d been using for student demonstrations. After the final one, he asked if he could use the Legos for a science experiment. He turned them into a belts-and-rollers-type Van de Graaff generator and produced groundbreaking work in electric fluids. This research was published in Physical Review Letters after Pettit returned to Earth. Most of us probably could not even spell Van de Graaff generator, and this dude is up there, in space, building them out of toys.<\/p>\n

The way Pettit, a chemical engineer by training, explains things is that he has the \u201cprogrammatic\u201d scientific research he does for NASA, and then there\u2019s everything else, often done during his limited free time.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is well-planned, well thought out, peer-reviewed, and uplinked to station with the supplies needed,\u201d he said of programmatic research. \u201cAnd then you have what I call science of opportunity. This is science which comes to mind while you are there, simply because you are there, and you can do it because you can. The scientific disciplines that I\u2019ve dabbled in on the International Space Station include fluid physics, classic physics, chemistry, biology, plant growth, and Earth observations.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

,<\/p>\n

Art and science<\/h2>\n

Most recently Pettit mixed art and science.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have access to a freezer kept at -95 degrees centigrade (-140 F). What would you do with such a freezer in space?\u201d he wrote this past weekend. \u201cI decided to grow thin wafers of water ice for no more reason than I\u2019m in space and I can. Plus I wanted to see how the freezing front behaves in 0g (without gravitational buoyancy, how does the freezing front push the tiny bubbles around).\u201d<\/p>\n

The result, in the image above, is breathtaking. \u201cScience, or should I say Nature, has a way of presenting surprising beauty if one is willing to look,\u201d he commented.<\/p>\n

Pettit arrived on a Soyuz vehicle in September alongside two Russian cosmonauts. For a few weeks he was a crew member on the space station with rookie astronaut Matthew Dominick, who has since returned to Earth on the Crew-8 Dragon spacecraft. Both are talented photographers, and they were attempting to capture the recent outburst of auroras due to the solar flares.<\/p>\n

According to Pettit, they had tried for several days to catch the action but had only seen lackluster views so far.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were out of energy at the end of a long day and reluctant to once again set up our cameras\u2026 for yet another \u2018No Show,\u2019\u201d he wrote. \u201cWe were just heading to some much needed sleep when we made the mistake of peeking out the Cupola windows. Stunning was the word. It looked like @iss had been shrunk to some miniature dimension and inserted into a neon sign. We were not flying above the aurora; we were flying in the aurora. And it was blood red.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

Caught off guard, the pair quickly set up their cameras and caught the view. This would seem to be the epitome of the \u2018science of opportunity.\u2019<\/p>\n

Although the International Space Station has been inhabited by humans for a quarter of a century now, we\u2019re only beginning to study the realm of weightlessness and off-world living and its impacts on humans and life. We expect our astronauts to be calm and courageous, and I think it\u2019s appropriate to add another adjective to the list of requirements: curious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For his most recent trip to the International Space Station, in lieu of bringing coffee or some other beverage in his \u201cpersonal drink bag\u201d allotment for the stay, NASA astronaut Don Pettit asked instead for a couple of bags of unflavored gelatin. This was not for cooking purposes but rather to perform scientific experiments. How […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44811,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1301,190,9501,21],"class_list":["post-44810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-don-pettit","tag-nasa","tag-science-2","tag-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44810"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44810\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}