Don Pettit, NASA’s oldest active astronautreturned to the earth on April 20, the day he turned 70 years old. That concluded his fourth trip to space – a busy 220 days at the International Space Station.
Like other crew members at the space station, Mr. Pettit has carried out experiments, spoken with students and conducted hours to maintain his health and to avert the loss of bone density. But the most striking work he did in the earth was his photography.
Most people on earth never get the chance to go to space. “I could try to give them a look through my images,” said Mr. Pettit during a press conference a few weeks after his return.
Mr. Pettit noted that hard-core photographers always want a camera in hand. “I could look out the window and just enjoy the view,” he said. “But when I look out the window, just enjoy the view, it is like:” Oh, wow, a meteor. Oh, wow. Look that. Man, there is a flash there. What is that? ” And: “Oh, look at that, a volcano that ends.” It is like: ‘Ok, where is my camera?
Sometimes he set up five cameras at the same time In the Coepola module of the Space StationWhere seven windows offer a panoramic view of space and earth.
Space photography often looks like night photography. Stars are weak and exposures that last seconds or minutes are needed to collect enough photons. But nothing is standing still in a job. The space station zooms around the earth with about five miles per second and the earth also rotates.
Sometimes Mr. benefited Pettit of the movement for artistic beauty – lights under fading in glowing lines, while the stars above argued in the sky.
“I think this is a mix of both science and art,” Mr. Pettit wrote on x. “There are so many techno-geek things to see, or you can just lean back and think ‘How cool’.”
Other times the camera was mounted on an “orbital sideral tracker” – a homemade device that was raised Mr Pettit of the earth that would slowly turn to prevent the movement of the space station so that the lens remained in a certain place in the air.
The tracker made an exposure of 10 seconds possible to catch a crystal clear image of the Milky Way far above a cloudy Pacific Ocean just before sunrise. The blue-purple glow stems from the scattering of sunlight of nitrogen in the atmosphere of the earth.
The Sidereal tracker also made the image below possible, taken by the window of a docked spacex crew tarragon spacecraft.
The two dwarf systems in the image are the large and small Magellanic clouds. On a cosmic scale they belong to the nearest neighbors of our Galaxy Milky Way.
In April Mr. took Pettit on this video of the essential rhythmic pulsations of Auroras-the glowing light that broadcast when molecules in the atmosphere are bombed by high energy particles from the sun.
Sometimes the colorful lights were made by human activities, not cosmic phenomena. The green stripes on this photo are almost the same color as Auroras, but it is the lights used by fishing boats from Thailand to put on squid.
With his camera down to the earth, Mr. registered. Pettit lightning in the upper atmosphere above the Amazon basin in South America. For the video, time was stretched in length to 33 seconds of about 6 seconds, which revealed more structure in the flashes.
The Betsiboka -River in Madagascar remembered Mr. Pettit of blood vessels of the eye.
Metropolitan areas light up at night, just like forest fires.
Mr. Pettit also used opportunities to catch the coming and going spacecraft of the earth – including a test launch From a SpaceX Starship Rocket From Texas last November …
… and the docking of a SpaceX Dragon -Space Varitage with freight to the Space Station in December.
During his Off-Duty time, Mr. Pettit also made up fun science experiments. One showed electrically charged water droplets that dance around a Teflon knitting needle. “I want to do things in the space that you can only do in space,” he said. “And I will worry about catching up TV programs and things like that after I get back.”
In another experiment, he injected dye into a water play and created a bulbs that looked somewhat on the planet Jupiter, or a very nice marble.
Mr. Pettit also solved an antacide tablet in a water atmosphere. Without gravity to increase the bubbles and easy to escape from the water, the patterns of pop, plop, fizz, are bustling in the room completely different.
He also froze thin waffles of water ice at minus 140 degrees Fahrenheit. “What would you do with such a freezer in the room?” He wrote on x. “For no more reason I decided to grow thin waffles of water ice than I have in the room and I can.”
Photographing the ice waffles by polarizing filters revealed complicated crystal patterns.
Mr. Pettit is the oldest current NASA Astronaut, but he is not the oldest person who goes to a job. That was John Glennwho was the first American astronaut who circled the earth in 1962, and then flew again In 1998 on the Space Shuttle Discovery at the age of 77.
Mr. Pettit is not even the oldest person who spends time at the international space station. A private -astronaut, Larry Connor, was 72 years old when he spent two weeks in 2022 as part operated on a mission By Axiom Space of Houston.
“I am only 70, so I have a few good years more,” said Mr. Pettit during the press conference. “I could see that I could get another flight or two before I am ready to hang my rocket mouthpieces.”
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