Astronaut Moments: Don Pettit, Science of Opportunity

As NASA astronaut Don Pettit returns to the International Space Station for the fourth time, he will be bringing with him ideas… ideas for science experiments! In addition to his duties onboard the space station, Pettit will be conducting what he calls “Science of Opportunity” – bonus science experiments of his own in addition to those he’ll work on day-to-day. These experiments could include everyday objects found on station, including liquid salt, powdered milk, and even Legos. As Pettit demonstrated in the past with his previous experiments, sometimes this bonus science leads to peer reviewed scientific papers and new discoveries, proving you never know until you try. What Science of Opportunity will Pettit attempt on this latest mission? Follow his mission on Instagram and X at @Astro_Pettit to find out.

What is said in the film

What got me interested in science? I think my back yard. Back in Silverton, Oregon, you walk outside and you see Earth, seeing things, you see a row of ants walking down the sidewalk. It's like, wow, look at that. Why are they walking in a line?

What happens if one of them gets lost? Where are they going? It's telling you a story and the answers aren't in the back of the story. You have to figure things out yourself. So I got interested in science because of Earth.

We conduct science on the International Space Station because it is an environment where human beings are not innately meant to be. And because of that, you can learn things about human physiology. You can learn things about physics and chemistry that are impossible to learn on Earth. There are two main categories of science. You have the programmatic science.

This is well planned, well thought out, peer reviewed and uplinked to station with the supplies needed. And then you have what I call Science of Opportunity. And this is science that comes to mind while you are there simply because you are there. And you can do it because you can. Scientific disciplines that I've dabbled in on the International Space Station: Fluid physics.

Classic physics. Chemistry. Biology. Plant growth. Earth observations that are unique from an orbital environment.

A number of my Science of Opportunity investigations have resulted in peer reviewed scientific papers. One is growing sodium chloride crystals. And a salt shaker won't work in weightlessness, right? It'll be a mess. So the NASA food people have a little squeeze bottle of a saturated solution of sodium chloride, and you can put that on your food if you want to add salt.

And I was using this saturated solution of sodium chloride to do aqueous phase crystal growth of sodium chloride crystals. And there were a number of fascinating observations that could be made by doing this in weightlessness, and resulted in these three publications. The particle agglomeration. I had bags of various kinds of powder. You've got powdered milk and you've got freeze dried coffee in a bag, and instead of putting water in it, you can blow the bag up.

And you could look at it and you could see what happens when you shake it up. And I was playing with all these bags and in every case, these particles, millimeters in size, just floating around would rapidly in tens of seconds form centimeters, size clumps. I thought, wow, isn't that cool? All these different particles. I filmed it and Stan Love, who's an astronaut in the office who is a planetary geologist by training...

He saw that, and he said that this has implications to planet formation. How you go from something that's one millimeter to something the size of your fist, has not been really understood. And these simple videos that I downlinked helped scientists understand what that process is. And it doesn't get any better than that... When casual observations, simply because you are there, and you can...

calling it Science of Opportunity leads to opening up a whole new level of investigation. We had some educational demonstrations with Legos, making various things for student downlink. And after that was all done, I said, hey, can I use the Legos to make something that I'd like to make? Sure. Go ahead.

Use the Legos! And I used the Legos to make a Van De Graaff Generator, and this allowed me to have a source of static electric voltage. And I did a lot of observations with water and other solutions, making these Taylor Cones in the weightless environment. And then one time I was giving a presentation to university level students, and we started talking and we had this collaboration and using my data with graduate students, published a paper in Phys Rev Letters. And the neatest aspect about this paper is in the experimental section.

It says, "roller and belt, Van De Graaf Generator was made on space station out of Legos" And it's like wow! Phys Rev Letters! Peer reviewed scientific publication. And part of the data came from a piece of equipment that was made from Legos. That's Science of Opportunity.

It's inevitable when you have a laboratory, whether it's on Earth or in space or on the moon, there will be Science of Opportunity because of the people that are doing research. They will have other ideas and they will see things simply because they are there. And they can, and they'll mess around a little bit. And maybe most of that won't go anywhere. But every once in a while, there'll be one of those that turned into the next generation of programmatic science.

I'm Don Pettit, I'm a NASA astronaut.

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