NASA's oldest active astronaut, Don Pettit, returned to Earth on April 20th, when he turned 70. It concluded his fourth space trip, a busy 220-day trip to the International Space Station.
Like other crew members at the space station, Pettit conducted experiments, spoke with students, worked out for hours to stay healthy and stop losing bone density. However, the most eye-catching piece he played on orbit was his photographs.
Most people on Earth don't get the chance to go to space. “I got a glimpse into my image from them,” Pettit said at a press conference a few weeks after he returned to Japan.
Pettit said hardcore photographers always want to have a camera. “I could look out the window and enjoy the view,” he said. “But when I look out the window, I'm just enjoying the view, saying, “Ah, amazing, meteor. Ah, amazing. Look at it. Man, there's a flash there. What is it?” And then, “Ah, looking at it, the volcano goes away.” “OK, where is my camera?”
Sometimes he sets up five cameras at once on the cupola module at the space station. There, seven windows provide panoramic views of space and the Earth.
Space photography is often very similar to night photography. The stars are dim and require exposure lasting seconds or minutes to collect enough photons. But on track, nothing is sitting. The space station zooms around 5 miles per second, and the Earth is spinning.
Sometimes, Pettitt used the movement of artistic beauty. Under the light that was blurred and blurred by the shining lines, the stars above followed the arc of the sky.
“I think these are both science and art blends,” Pettit wrote X:
The camera was also attached to a “trajectory fitting tracker.” Pettit is a homemade device that slowly pivots the space station's movements, allowing the lens to remain pointed towards a specific location in the sky.
The tracker allowed for 10 seconds to expose a clear image of the Milky Way above the cloudy Pacific Ocean just before sunrise. The blue-purple glow appears from the scattering of sunlight from nitrogen in the Earth's atmosphere.
Sidereal tracker also enabled the image below taken through the windows of the docked SpaceX crew Dragon Spacecraft.
The two d-star galaxies in the image are large and small Magellan clouds. On the cosmic scale, they are our closest neighbors to the Milky Way galaxy.
In April, Pettit recorded this video of the etheric rhythmic pulsation of the Aurora. It is the glowing light that is emitted when molecules in the atmosphere are bombed by high-energy particles from the sun.
Sometimes, colorful light was created by human activity rather than space phenomena. The green stripes in this photo are roughly the same colour as the Aurora, but are the light used by fishing boats off the coast of Thailand to attract squid.
As his camera pointed to the Earth, Pettit recorded lightning bolts in the upper atmosphere above the Amazon Basin in South America. For the video, the time ranged from about 6 seconds to 33 seconds, revealing more structure of the flash.
The Betoshiboca River in Madagascar reminded Pettit of the blood vessels of the eye.
Just like wildfires, metropolitan areas become brighter at night.
Pettit also took advantage of the opportunity to capture the ingress and outflow of spacecraft from Earth, including a test launch of a SpaceX Starship rocket from Texas last November…
…and docking SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft, which will carry cargo to the space station in December.
During his time at work, Pettit also created a fun science experiment. One showed electrically charged water droplets dancing around a Teflon knitting needle. “I want to do in space what you can only do in space,” he said. “And I'm worried that once I'm back, I'll catch up with TV shows and stuff.”
In another experiment, he injected food coloring into a sphere of water, creating a sphere that resembles the planet Jupiter, or a very clean marble.
Pettit also dissolved antacid tablets in water polo. Without gravity that raises bubbles and easily escapes from the water, the patterns of pop, prop, fizz and fizz are completely different in the universe.
He also frozen thin wafers of water ice at a negative of 140 degrees Fahrenheit. “What do you do with such a freezer in space?” he writes to X:
Photographing the ice wafer via a polarizing filter revealed complex crystal patterns.
Pettit is the oldest NASA astronaut today, but he is not the oldest person to go to orbit. It was John Glenn. He circled the Earth in 1962 and flew again in 1998 at the age of 77 at the age of 77.
Pettit isn't even the oldest person to spend time on the International Space Station. Private astronaut Larry Connor was 72 years old, who spent two weeks in 2022 as part of a mission run by Axiom Space in Houston.
“I'm only 70, so I have a little better years left,” Pettit said at a news conference. “We managed to make another flight a little or two inches before we were ready to cut the rocket nozzle.”
