Don Pettit

How it started.

Don grew up in Silverton, Oregon, and trained as a chemical engineer. He worked as a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory before NASA selected him in 1996. Photography had been part of his life since sixth grade, when he started with a Kodak Brownie and developed his own black-and-white film.

Science worth sharing.

His first spaceflight began in 2002 with Expedition 6. During off-duty hours, he filmed the simple microgravity demonstrations that became Saturday Morning Science. Everyday materials let viewers see how bubbles, liquids and other objects behave in orbit. He continued that approach in the 2012 video series Science off the Sphere, a NASA partnership with the American Physical Society.

Making pictures in orbit.

Don also built a camera tracker from spare parts aboard the station to make sharper pictures of Earth at night. His 2016 book Spaceborne collected photographs from his space travels. On his latest mission, he worked with Babak Tafreshi to photograph matching places and phenomena from orbit and from the ground, bringing the results to the National Geographic exhibition Our World From Above and Below.