Don Pettit, the NASA’s oldest Astronaut Astronaut, returned to Earth on April 20, just the day he turned 70. He concluded like this Your fourth trip to space: 220 busy days at the International Space Station.
Like other crew members of that station, Petit did experimentsHe spoke with students and exercised for hours to maintain their health and avoid loss of bone density.
But the most striking work he did in orbit were his Enigmatic photographs.
Most people will never have the opportunity to go to space. “I could try to give them A vision through my images”Pettit said during a press conference a couple of weeks after his return.
Petit said that inveterate photographers always want to have A camera in hand. “I could look out the window and just enjoy the view,” he said.
“But when I look out the window, simply enjoying the view, it’s like, ‘well, a meteorite. Look at that. There is a flash. What’s that?’ And ‘Well, look that, an eruption volcano’. It’s like, ‘then, where is my camera? I have to photograph it. ”
Sometimes install five cameras at the same time in the dome module of the space station, where seven windows offer panoramic views of space and earth.
Space photography is usually very similar to night photography. The stars are faint and second or minutes exhibitions are needed to gather enough photons. But in orbit, Nothing is still. The space station revolves around the earth 8 kilometers per second, and the earth also turns.
Sometimes, Pettit took advantage of the movement to create artistic beauty: the lights below faded in bright lines, while the stars above They traced arches in the sky. “I think they are a mixture of science and art,” he wrote on the social network X. “There are many Tecno-Geek things to see, or you can simply sit and think ‘how good’.”
Other times, the camera was mounted on an “orbital sidereal tracker”, a homemade device that Pettit brought from the earth and that turned slowly to counteract the movement of the space stationso that the objective always remained pointing to a specific point of the sky.
The tracker allowed an exhibition of 10 seconds to capture a crystalline image of the Milky Way on a cloudy Pacific Ocean just before dawn. The blue-púrpura glow arises from The dispersion of light solar in nitrogen of the Earth’s atmosphere.
In April, Pettit also recorded a video of the ethereal rhythmic pulsations of the auroras, the bright light emitted when the atmosphere molecules are bombarded by High energy particles from the sun.
Sometimes, colored lights are due to human activities, not to Cosmic phenomena. The green stripes of an image are almost the same color as the auroras, but in reality they are the lights used by fishing boats in front of Thailand to attract squid.
With his camera pointing to the Earth, Pettit recorded lightning in the upper atmosphere on the Amazon basin, in South America. For the video, the time was extended from about 6 seconds to 33 seconds, revealing More structure in the flashes.
Pettit also took advantage of opportunities to Capture the comings and goings of spacecraft from Earthincluding the test launch of a Spacex Starship rocket from Texas in November and the coupling of a Spacex Dragon spacecraft that transported load to the space station.
When I was not on service, Pettit invented fun scientific experiments. One of them showed Electrically loaded water drops They danced around a Teflon knitting needle.
“I want to do things in space that can only be done in space,” he said. “And I’ll worry about Putting me up with television programs And things like this when he returns, ”he added.
In another experiment, he injected food coloring into a sphere of water, creating A blood cell that in some way looked like Jupiteror a very beautiful ball.
Petit also dissolved An antacid pill inside a water sphere. Without gravity that causes the bubbles to rise and get out of water, the patterns of PLOP, PLOP, FIZZ, FIZZ are completely different in space.
He also froze fine water wafers at least 140 degrees Fahrenheit. “What would you do with such a freezer in space?” He wrote in X. “I decided Cultivate fine water wafers Without more reason than because I am in space and I can do it. ”
Photographing ice wafers through polarizing filters revealed intricate crystalline patterns.
Pettit is NASA’s current older astronaut, but he is not the oldest person who was in orbit. That person was John Glenn, the first American astronaut who turned the Earth in 1962and that flew again in 1998 in the discovery space ferry at the age of 77.
Pettit is not even the oldest person who spent time at the space station. A private astronaut, Larry Connor, was 72 years old when He spent two weeks in 2022 As part of a mission operated by Axiom Space, by Houston.
“I am only 70 years old, so I have a few good years left,” Petit said during the press conference. “I could see me doing one or two more flights Before being ready to hang my rockets, ”he said.
Translation: Patricia Sar
