A Poem for Saturday: One Planet is Not Enough
Last Day in Space by Don Pettit Tomorrow we light our rocket, we burn our engines and likewise, burn a hole in the sky, And thus fall to Earth. How does one spend your last day in space? Looking at Earth, a blue jewel surrounded by inky blackness, Pure Occipital ...Read More
From the Diary of a Space Zucchini: The Frontier
Tonight, Gardener and his crew will depart in their seed pod. The replacement crew is ready to carry on in their place. He is wearing his space suit undergarments. Not too stylish but functional. He gave all of us an extra long smell. His nose twitched with the slightest tickle ...Read More
From the Diary of a Space Zucchini: Preparing for Departure
June 29, 2012 The crew is busy with their departure preparations. They are flying back and forth with bags of gear. Gardener tried on a special suit made out of tight fitting fabric. It keeps his roots and stalks from expanding when he returns to Earth’s gravity. He said things ...Read More
A (New) Moon is Born
I saw the waning crescent moon, a small sliver of white rising above the Earth limb. It reminded me of a glowing fingernail clipping. Like a rainbow of only blue, the atmosphere on edge filled the gap between Earth and space—electrifying diaphanous beauty. Venus was there, watching. Aldebaran in Taurus ...Read More
From the Diary of a Space Zucchini: Gardener's Spacesuit
June 17 Excitement is in the air. Gardener said we will soon be returning to Earth. Our part of the mission is nearly complete and the new crew will take over for us. I am a bit worried about Broccoli, Sunflower, and me. If Gardener leaves, who will take care ...Read More
From the Diary of a Space Zucchini: Baby on Board!
June 9 Great news! I have a baby brother sprout! Gardener just showed me baby Zuc. Yes, there's a baby onboard the International Space Station. He is strong and healthy and ready to move from the sprouter into his own aeroponic bag. While Broccoli and Sunflower are great companions, there ...Read More
With Warm Regards
If Matisse and Van Gogh worked together to make a crew portrait, this is what it might be like: l to r: Joe Acaba, Gennady Padalka, Oleg Kononenko, Sergei Revin, André Kuipers (I was running the camera). The thermal camera I used operates in the far infrared, with wavelengths around ...Read More
Stray Light
Stray light - those nasty reflections off our Space Station windows - can ruin the aesthetics of nighttime imagery and viewing. Reflected light from our numerous control panels and computer screens is hardly noticeable until you closely inspect your pictures, typically after returning to Earth when there is no possibility ...Read More
From the Diary of a Space Zucchini: Happy Sprout Day!
April 12 We got new aeroponic bags today. They are a new design, much simpler than the old ones. One corner is cut off and then pushed inwards so it points inside the bag. This makes an opening where the water does not crawl out from capillary action. A piece ...Read More
From the Diary of a Space Zucchini - What Do Dragons Eat?
April 2 Oh no, we have algae root! Our plastic potting bags, being transparent, allow our roots to be soaked in light. That does not particularly bother us, but it allows for some freeloaders to make their home in the dampness of our plastic, aeroponic bags. So our planter bags ...Read More
From the Diary of a Space Zucchini: An Excuse
Me and my “Buds” have been busy working on our mission together with our animal crewmates over the past two months. On our mission, we have taken nearly 250,000 images, about one quarter of all those taken over the previous 11 years. I have been faithfully making entries into my ...Read More
In My Spare Time: A Weekend With A Freezer
I asked if I could use one of the research freezers for a weekend during my off-duty time. I made thin sheets of water (sort of like a soap film without the soap), about 1 mm thick and froze them. Then I looked at the ice under polarized light using ...Read More
A Poem for Saturday: Embrace Me, May 5, 2003
Oh Mother Earth, embrace me with all of your weight. I am pressed into your bosom and like Atlas, I carry the World’s load. I leave the comforts of an orbital womb and am born a second time. Expedition 6 crewmates Ken Bowersox, Nikolai Budarin and I leaving the International ...Read More
A Poem for Saturday: Helen of Earth
Helen of Earth. An Alien force, smitten by the sight of Earth. Stunning occipital pleasure, with a face of such beauty. As to launch a thousand ships, laying siege to our planet, until they can take her as their own. The Kamchatka Coast photographed from the International Space Station 23:27 ...Read More
From the Diary of a Space Zucchini: Fresh Air
March 20 There was a time where I had no memory; I thought this must be the Great Compost. Since waking I heard Gardener talking to me about what happened. We were transplanted once again into new plastic bags. Our stems and roots were trimmed. Our water diet was replaced ...Read More
From the Diary of a Space Zucchini: My Aching Roots
March 7 I am making a second set of flowers. They are all male flowers, full of fragrance for my crewmates to enjoy. I see Gardener smile. March 8 Oh my aching roots! I am sick; my flower buds have wilted into little brown nubbins. My leaves have a fringe ...Read More
Personal Reality
In space I see things that are not there. Flashes in my eyes, like luminous dancing fairies, give a subtle display of light that is easy to overlook when I’m consumed by normal tasks. But in the dark confines of my sleep station, with the droopy eyelids of pending sleep, ...Read More
A Poem for Saturday: I Wonder Why
I wonder why the sky is up, and why the stars abound? Click for the big picture And why the Sun comes up each morn, and why the Earth goes ’round? I wonder what the Sun on Mars, would bring at dusk and dawn? I wonder what two moons would ...Read More
From the Diary of a Space Zucchini: Crewmates for Astro-Z
February 20 We have two new crewmates, Sunflower and Broccoli. Sunflower has a long stem for the size of his leaves. He is standing tall. Broccoli is small and weak. His sprout is so small that without the normal gravitational signals, surface tension forces keep his cotyledons from breaking free ...Read More
Astro-Z in Zero-G: The Diary of A Space Zucchini - A Rose
January 18 I am about 15 centimeters high now but still only have four leaves. I am vibrant green and happy. My roots still drink this sour tea but it seems to have everything I need. I am reluctant to ask my crewmate where this comes from. January 19 I ...Read More
Astro-Z The Prequel: Growing Plants in Zero-G
Editor's note: This was originally posted 5 May 2003 during Don's first six month mission to the International Space Station, where he served as Science Officer. Growing plants in the weightless environment of an orbiting spacecraft is much harder than meets the eye. Having a supply of tomato and basil ...Read More
Astro-Z in Zero-G: The Diary of a Space Zucchini - Part 1
@Astro_Pettit takes care of me. He is a gardener in space.— AstroZ in ZeroG (@Astro_Zuc) April 3, 2012 January 5, 2012 I sprouted, thrust into this world without anyone consulting me. I am not one of the beautiful; I am not one that by any other name instills flutters in ...Read More
Space Is My Mistress
Space is my Mistress, and she beckons my return. Since our departure I think of you and yearn to fly across the heavens arm in arm. I marvel at your figure, defined by the edges of continents. You gaze at me with turquoise eyes, perhaps mistaken for ocean atolls. You ...Read More
Europe's Automated Transfer Vehicle Docks
Breathing fire and bringing good stuff. Click for a bigger image Click for a bigger image Click for a bigger imageRead More
One Million Pictures
This is the millionth picture taken from ISS. Part of a time lapse series taken at night. I do not know who took it, either Dan Burbank or myself. Neither of us can remember! Click for a bigger image.Read More
On the Trails of Stars
The sky is not the limit for producing artistic compositions. Put a camera on a tripod, point at a dark starry sky, and hold the shutter open for about 10 minutes, and the image will show stars as circular arcs. Normally, these star trails are created as the Earth rotates ...Read More
A Poem for Saturday: Halfway to Pluto
Don Pettit Node 2, Deck 5 ISS, LEO I’m halfway to Pluto and Earth doesn’t know The trials of travel in space as we go With thrust to our backs while we speed on our way The blue dot of Earth becomes fainter each day When earthly horizons slip from ...Read More
Iridium Satellite Flares
There are bright points of light in the night sky. They are not Venus, Jupiter, or the Space Station but something that can be just as bright. It is sun glint reflecting from one of the three main mission antennas (MMA), or occasionally a solar panel, of one of the ...Read More
Tierra del Fuego
Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire, was what Magellan named the tip of South America in 1520. He had seen the fires set by local inhabitants who did not want the Portuguese explorer to set foot on their land. A new page in the history of this distant part ...Read More
Blood and Treasure
Gold, silk, and spices were the tangible treasures from past explorations. Today, the frontier of space offers treasures that are golden but not gold—secrets about the biochemistry of life, drawn from the bodies of astronauts. Weightlessness poses a biochemical challenge to human space travelers, who develop a host of fascinating ...Read More
A Flashing Success
Flashing the International Space Station with beams of light as it passes overhead had never been successfully done - until yesterday. It sounds deceptively easy. In an earlier post I wrote about the technical requirements. But like so many other tasks, it becomes much more involved in the execution than ...Read More
Today's Coffee is Tomorrow's Coffee. Or Tea.
During the flight of STS-126 in 2008, we carried up three refrigerator-sized pieces of equipment. One was a toilet for the NASA side of space station. There was already one on the Russian side, so this one gave us redundancy. In the past, when the toilet broke, all work had ...Read More
Earth Photography: Harder Than It Looks
From my orbital perspective, I am sitting still and Earth is moving. I sit above the grandest of all globes spinning below my feet, and watch the world speed by at an amazing eight kilometers per second (288 miles per minute, or 17,300 miles per hour). This makes Earth photography ...Read More
One (Really Good) Reason Not To Clean Your Closet
On the International Space Station, we have a closet module called the Permanent Multipurpose Module. Its prosaic name is PMM, an acronym that has metamorphosed beyond the original assemblage of words to become a noun on its own, pronounced pee-em-em (only at NASA can we create new words without vowels). ...Read More
A Lab for Science, and for Thinking
The International Space Station was conceived and constructed through the cooperation of fifteen nations. Now, with it's construction complete, we can focus on how best to use it. We have built a laboratory located on the premier frontier of our era. Our Earth-honed intuition no longer applies in this orbital ...Read More
The World Through a Looking Glass
Looking through the cupola windows on the International Space Station, it’s only natural to reflect upon who we are and where we fit into the world below. Like something out of Alice in Wonderland, this orbital looking glass can be both a window through which to observe the jeweled sphere ...Read More
Close Shave
I have never been able to shave with a safety razor without slicing my face, so I use a rotary electric razor instead. In weightlessness they work just as well, and the whiskers are captured inside the shaving head. But how does one clean out the whiskers in weightlessness? In ...Read More
The Eye of Issyk Kul
Kyrgyzstan is wedged in the mountainous wrinkles between Kazakhstan and China, created long ago when the land mass we now call India, propelled by plate tectonics, slammed into the Asian plate. Living there are a proud people with a rich history, surrounded by natural, high-altitude beauty. Click for a larger ...Read More
The Sweet Smell of Molecules
A vacuum is a condition that is nearly devoid of molecules, and space is a molecular desert that makes the Empty Quarter of the Saudi Arabian peninsula seem like an oasis in comparison. But the space vacuum still has some molecules—residue from galactic processes, solar wind or atomic detritus spalled ...Read More
The Terminator
Twice a year, near the winter and summer solstices, the orbit of the International Space Station nearly parallels the terminator—the fuzzy line separating day from night on the surface below. For a period of about a week, we live in what seems like perpetual twilight, being in neither full daylight ...Read More
Grand Views of the Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is simply amazing when viewed from an orbital perspective. You instinctively recognize it, even though you have never seen it from this vantage point before. Somehow, your brain can warp all those vacation memories from visiting the South Rim into something recognizable. But ...Read More
Candid and the Camera
For my Soyuz launch, I had worn a standard Shuttle diaper with two inserts for extra absorption. (I have found it advantageous to add a little extra in certain places—in weightlessness, urine will creep around under the guise of capillary action and find your long underwear.) Still, we were in ...Read More
Gone for the Season
Being absent for the holidays is collateral damage for an explorer, whatever the location. In Antarctica, the short Antarctic summer is when most exploration happens, and this falls over the Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year holidays. Maybe you can get home by Valentine’s Day; it is best to arrive bearing ...Read More
The Pieces Come Together
Four days ago our rocket was in pieces, scattered across the floor of the assembly building. Like anxious parents checking on their sleeping children, we took one last peek inside our Soyuz spacecraft. Everything was tucked in where it should be. Three days ago the pieces started to come together, ...Read More
Six Months Turns to Ten
Space Station expeditions are planned for six months. Some may be a few weeks shorter, some longer. Malfunctions in your spacecraft can impact the mission duration either way by two months or more. Oleg Kononenko (center), Andre Kuipers (right) and I taking a walk on the snowy - and cold ...Read More
A One-Way Ticket
Unlike my previous trips, this time I arrived in Russia on a one-way ticket. My bridge has been burned. And now I’m in Kazakhstan, awaiting our December 21 launch. Scuttling your ship is a historically proven method (think Cortés) to close the door to the known and force yourself to ...Read More
What Makes an Explorer?
There is a type of social deviate who doesn’t fit in, and who naturally seeks the freedom of the wilderness. The American frontier was settled by that kind of spirit. Ironically, the wilderness of space requires a high degree of social conformity before you are allowed to enter, so today’s ...Read More
The Road to Space - The Explorer's Dilemma
The road to space is a long and arduous path, a meandering trip that in many ways is more demanding than the Space Station mission itself. Training to fly into space is also the next best thing to actually flying into space. And flying into space is what my job ...Read More
Propane
Classic wisdom says that propane stoves do not work well in cold climes. The propane bottle will get so cold that the liquefied gas would rather stay in the tank than come out to play. Snow-bound expeditions use the old classic white gas stove. Like a medieval dragon, these white ...Read More
Featureless Humans Are Still Human
All 8 of our expedition members work closely together on a daily basis. Each morning we gather at 9:00 (New Zealand time) and go off in search of meteorites. By 18:00 we are usually back in camp after spending the day in temperatures of -20ºC with wind chill of -40. ...Read More
Perpetual Sun
In Antarctica, the summertime sun never sets. It is perpetual day. Instead of a ducking beneath the horizon, the sun circumscribes the sky every 24 hours. Due to our latitude near south 86 degrees, the sun never gets real high or real low. At local noon, the sun elevation is ...Read More
Concentrated by Wind
Another proposed mechanism to concentrate meteorites is by wind. Blown about by wind, geologists have theorized that the wind can aide in their concentration. Before I saw the wind affects first hand, I discounted this theory as nonsense. The Katabatic winds are second to none. We as humans living in ...Read More
Stranded Ice
As a mechanism for meteorite concentration, the lateral movement of glaciers from zones of accumulation to ablation is refereed to as "the conveyor belt model." But this simple concept alone does not explain many occurrences in areas where meteorites are found. There are areas of glacier ice, blue glacier ice, ...Read More
Conveyor Belt
There are a number of theories why meteorites are concentrated on the Antarctic ice sheets by about a factor of 1000 over the intrinsic fall rate [ref 1]. No matter the theory, they all hinge around the fact that the ice sheets are in a balance between growing and shrinking ...Read More
Keeping Electronic Gadgets Happy
Even in the wilderness, humans can not seem to do without their electronic devices. We bring crucial mission electronics such as Iridium satellite phones, radios, GPS receivers, and laptop computers. We also bring electronic condiments, items such as cameras, iPods, and DVD players. With a few exceptions, most of these ...Read More
Living in a Freezer
One unique aspect about Antarctica is living submerged in constant cold. While these temperatures seem extreme from the perspective of your living room back home, with the proper clothing, they become quite acceptable. Humans are remarkably adaptable and soon take to these temperatures as if they were the norm. I ...Read More
The Katabatic
The interior of Antarctic is cold. It is the coldest place on Earth if you discount regions in the upper atmosphere at 80 kilometer altitudes. The interior is at high altitude, varying from 8000 to 10000 feet. However, near the Antarctic coast, the temperatures are moderated by the ocean and ...Read More
Concentrated Meteorites
For some reason, meteorites are found lying on the top of Antarctic ice fields in amazing numbers, much more so than what one would find in other areas of the world. The reason for this is generally understood [ref 1], however, like so many human spawned ideas into how nature ...Read More
First Meteorite
We search, once again, using our mechanized sledge-dog equivalents. Forming a classic search line at the base of a blue ice region, we slowly drive across with our snow mobiles, looking for any black spot. If you see a black spot, it is a rock. If you find a rock, ...Read More
The Flag of Exploration
This flag, pressed into service for a humble yet important duty, provides notification of occupancy when raised over the latrine tent.Read More
Moving Camp
We broke camp this morning, loaded up our Nansen sledges, and formed a snow mobile convoy in the middle of Antarctica, with eight machines, occasionally blowing smoke in protest of the load. We drove from the Otway Massif to Mauger Nunatak, a section of blue ice glacier that has never ...Read More
Deployment
We deployed to the Grosvenor Mountain region in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains. The actual landing area is a natural stretch of ice and snow near the Otway Massif. Apparently there is a sufficiently long enough stretch of icy snow to land the rather largish C-130 cargo plane. We loaded up from ...Read More
Ready to Deploy
Tomorrow, December 8th, we deploy to the ice fields in the Grosvenor Mountains via a C-130 military cargo plane. If you consider that we are living across the International Date Line, thus being one day ahead of the States, we will deploy about the same time as the first launch ...Read More
Training Camp
Before one is dropped off in the middle of this continent for six weeks of living in a Scott tent, it is wise to make certain your team knows how to deal with the necessities of camping. Read More
McMurdo Station
McMurdo is part frontier town and part science lab. A delightful place that somehow attracts explorers, scientists, and misfits that need some form of temporary escape from the inherent organization of our civilized places back home. My first impression is something from a B-grade western set in some obscure mining ...Read More
Confusion in the Southern Hemisphere
People who grew up in the northern hemisphere often times find it a bit confusing when they first travel southward to New Zealand.Read More
The Grosvenor Mountains
This year's ANSMET search area for meteorites is in the Grosvenor (pronounced 'Grovnor') Mountains, a section in the Trans-Antarctic Mountain range. This mountain range goes from McMurdo Station near the coast and travels northwest into the interior (west of the geographic South Pole). At first I found the idea of ...Read More
Thanksgiving Late but not Late
Our team has found our way to Christchurch, New Zealand where we are making our preparations for deployment to the ice. The United States Antarctic Program is located at the Christchurch airport where scientists are issued their heavy Antarctic clothing, pack all their scientific gear, and load up on one ...Read More
Leaving for New Zealand
All the USA operations in Antarctica stage from Christchurch New Zealand, a delightful place in a country filled with equally delightful people. Read More
Chronicles on Ice
The Antarctic Search for Meteorites or ANSMET is a yearly expedition to gather meteorites that naturally concentrate on the Antarctic glaciers.Read More
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