Don Pettit isn’t your common senior citizen. As a substitute of having fun with life within the gradual lane, he’s preparing for a rocket journey to the Worldwide Area Station (ISS) on Wednesday.
At 69, Pettit is NASA’s oldest lively astronaut, and this might be his fourth journey to orbit in a flight profession spanning 22 years. He’ll head to house aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Alongside him might be cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner.
Pettit’s first journey to the house station was in 2002 — quickly after it turned operational — the place he served because the NASA science officer aboard the station as a part of Expedition 6.
The skilled astronaut additionally traveled to the station aboard Area Shuttle Endeavour on the STS-126 mission, whereas his most up-to-date go to to the orbital outpost was in 2011.
Pettit has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the College of Arizona, and through his house adventures, he likes to share particulars of his science experiments aboard the orbital laboratory. With that in thoughts, we are able to count on plenty of communications from Pettit by way of his social media feeds throughout his six-month stint in orbit.
“Throughout his earlier missions, Pettit has contributed to developments for human house exploration aboard the Worldwide Area Station, leading to a number of printed scientific papers and breakthroughs,” NASA stated.
He’s additionally an avid photographer and so we are able to additionally count on to see some dazzling imagery from him, like this infrared picture that he captured throughout his final mission and which he shared on X (previously Twitter) just some days in the past:
Camana, Peru area in close to infrared. Wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, this lush flora-packed river delta seems as vivid magenta. Camana is the grayish function within the decrease heart of the river delta. That is in stark distinction to the sparse foliage in… pic.twitter.com/zXu6Gor1MF
— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) September 1, 2024
Tips on how to watch
NASA will start a stay stream of the occasion at 11:15 a.m. ET on Wednesday, September 11, which can embrace the ultimate preparations for launch and the liftoff itself at 12:23 p.m. ET.
You possibly can watch by way of the video participant embedded on the high of this web page, or by heading to NASA’s YouTube channel, which can carry the identical feed.