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Pettit will return to space on Endeavour next fall

By Ed Stiles, College of Engineering
November 26, 2007

When we last heard from NASA astronaut and UA Engineering alum Don Pettit earlier this year, he was in Antarctica with ANSMET (Antarctic Search for Meteorites) scientists camping on the ice and searching for meteorites.

Now it looks like Pettit will soon be off on another adventure aboard NASA’s space shuttle.

NASA announced last week that Pettit will replace astronaut Joan E. Higginbotham on space shuttle mission STS-126, which is slated to fly in September 2008. The shuttle will deliver equipment to the International Space Station (ISS).

This will be Pettit's second spaceflight. He first flew as a crewmember on ISS Expedition 6, logging more than 161 days in space, including more than 13 hours outside the station on two spacewalks. He traveled to the station aboard shuttle mission STS-113 in November 2002 and returned to Earth on the Soyuz TMA-1 spacecraft in May 2003.

Pettit’s 2002-2003 ISS mission was extended after Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry on Feb, 1, 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

On the 2008 mission, Pettit will serve as a mission specialist aboard shuttle Endeavour. Others on the mission are: Commander Christopher J. Ferguson, Pilot Eric A. Boe, and mission specialists Stephen G. Bowen, Robert S. Kimbrough and Heidemarie M. Stefanyshyn-Piper.

Those who followed Pettit's 2002-2003 ride aboard the ISS — and those who worked with him when he was a graduate student at UA — know he has an insatiable curiosity and views even the most mundane activities as opportunities for scientific experiment.

He wrote a “Saturday Morning Science” column while aboard the ISS about such off-hours experiments as assembling giant blobs of floating water that he spun, inflated with air and vibrated in microgravity ways. Physicists are still puzzling over some of his experimental results.

Pettit is a 1973 graduate of Silverton Union High School in Silverton, Ore. He earned his bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from Oregon State University in 1978 and a doctorate in chemical engineering from The University of Arizona in 1983.

He worked as a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1984 to1996 on several space-related projects. In 1996, NASA selected Pettit for the astronaut program.