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NASA's oldest active astronaut is also one of the most curious humans

“We made the mistake of peeking out the Cupola windows.”…

But just so you understand who we're dealing with, the thing to know about Pettit is that he is insatiably curious, and wants to share the wonder of science and the natural world with others. The way Pettit, a chemical engineer by training, explains things is that he has the "programmatic" scientific research he does for NASA, and then there's everything else, often done during his limited free time. For a few weeks he was a crew member on the space station with rookie astronaut Matthew Dominick, who has since returned to Earth on the Crew-8 Dragon spacecraft.

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