Frontier Lectures

Techno-Stories

from Space

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 7:00 pm Duncan Hall McMurtry Aud. Reception at 6:30 pm

Frontiers are interesting places; they offer the possibility to make observations outside our normal range of experience. The International Space Station is such a frontier offering a local reduction in acceleration forces by nearly a factor of a million. This allows the observation of subtle phenomena that are typically masked on Earth. This orbital vantage also allows observation of Earth phenomena on the length scale of half a continent. A smattering of my observations will be presented. There will be many questions and few answers, which of course is a characteristic of being on a frontier and why we venture there. Donald R. Pettit, Ph.D. NASA Astronaut
Donald Roy Pettit (born in 1955) is a NASA astronaut and chemical engineer. He is a veteran of two long-duration stays aboard the International Space Station, one space shuttle mission and a sixweek expedition to find meteorites in Antarctica. He has spent a total of 370 days in space . Pettit was raised in Silverton, Oregon. He earned a bachelors degree in chemical engineering from Oregon State University in 1978 and a doctoral degree from the University of Arizona in 1983. He worked as a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory until 1996, when he was selected as an astronaut candidate.

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