54
2014 Winter Meeting Plenary
Location: Grand Ballroom B
Date: Sunday, January 5
Time: 7:30–8:30 p.m.
Presider: Mary Mogge
Techno-Stories from Space,
by Don Pettit, NASA astronaut
Donald R. Pettit
Enter Your Students
in AAPT’s High School
Physics Photo Contest
Photos are accepted at
from March 1
to May 15, 2014
(contest details at website)
You can now go online to the AAPT
physics store to get extra copies of the
2013 High School Physics Photo Contest
Posters!
All proceeds go towards funding the
AAPT High School Physics Contest.
Donald Roy Pettit,
a chemical engineer and NASA astronaut, is a veteran of two long-duration stays aboard
the International Space Station, one space shuttle mission, and a six-week expedition to find meteorites in
Antarctica. He received a BS in Chemical Engineering from Oregon State University and a PhD in Chemical
Engineering from the University of Arizona. A veteran of three spaceflights, Pettit has logged more than 370
days in space and over 13 EVA (spacewalk) hours. He was a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory,
Los Alamos, NM, from 1984 to 1996. Projects there included reduced gravity fluid flow and materials process-
ing experiments onboard the NASA KC-135 airplane, atmospheric spectroscopy on noctilucent clouds seeded
from sounding rockets, fumarole gas sampling from volcanoes and problems in detonation physics. He was
a member of the Synthesis Group, slated with assembling the technology to return to the Moon and explore
Mars (1990) and the Space Station Freedom Redesign Team (1993). In 2006, Pettit joined the Antarctic Search
for Meteorites (ANSMET), spending six weeks in Antarctica collecting meteorite samples, including a lunar
meteorite. He lived aboard the International Space Station for 5½ months during Expedition 6, was a member
of the STS-126 crew, and again lived aboard the station for 6½ months as part of the Expedition 30/31 crew in
2011. During Expedition 30, Pettit made a video using an Angry Birds character to explain how physics works
in space.
Meet and Greet Dr. Pettit from 8:30–9 p.m.
