Donald Pettit

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Donald Roy Pettit
Donald Pettit
Astronaut, Cosmonaut
Nationality American
Born 20 April 1955
Silverton, Oregon
Other occupation Chemical Engineer
Space time 161d 01h 14m
Selection 1996 NASA Group
Missions STS-113, Expedition 6, Soyuz TMA-1, STS-126
Mission
insignia

Donald Roy Pettit (born 20 April 1955) is an American astronaut, a veteran of a six month stay aboard the International Space Station and a six week expedition to find meteorites in Antarctica.

Contents

[edit] Personal

Pettit, raised in Silverton, Oregon, 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. Pettit worked as a scientist as the Los Alamos National Laboratory until 1996, when he was selected as an astronaut candidate. Pettit is married and has two sons.

[edit] International Space Station

Pettit's sole space mission to date has been as a mission specialist on ISS Expedition 6 in 2002 and 2003. During his six-month stay aboard the space station, Pettit performed two EVAs to help install external scientific equipment. Throughout his stay on the International Space Station during his free time Don Pettit filmed numerous expiriments he conducted on free spheres of water in an extremely-low gravity environment in a series he called "Saturday Morning Science".

He is scheduled to fly back as a mission specialist to the ISS on board STS-126 at the end of 2008.

[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,[1] including a lunar meteorite. During the expedition Pettit was called on to perform emergency electrical repairs to a snowmobile and emergency dental surgery. Periods of tent-confining inclement weather were spent continuing Pettit's 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. (Pettit 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

  1. ^ Don Pettit Goes to Antarctica (2006-12-11). Retrieved on 2007-09-21.

[edit] External links

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