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(Noah Petro) I remember, on one of the very first days of my 9th grade Earth Science class,

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I had a teacher stand up with a fish tank full of water and he held up a rock

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and he held up a piece of wood and he asked the class, "What's going to sink and what's going to float?"

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Well, wood's going to float, rock's going to sink, easy, you know, it just makes sense.

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He put the rock in, he put the wood in, the wood sank and rock floated and I thought,

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my mind was blown, and I thought, "what?!"

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And it was essentially from there that everything else in that class was basically your assumptions

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can be wrong, you know, mother nature makes trees that sink and rocks that float.

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So let's learn why.  My jaw just dropped and I thought, well that's, that's what

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I want to do.  My name is Noah Petro and I study the surface of airless bodies in

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the solar system, focusing primarily on the surface of the Moon.

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(music kicks up)

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The mission that I've worked most closely with is the Chandrayaan-1 mission

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it was an Indian mission to orbit the Moon and I was

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working on one of the instruments on that mission called the Moon Mineralogy Mapper. The fun

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part comes when you figure out all of the problems and you can understand the limitations of your data

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and actually start to look at the geology of the surface of the Moon.

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And so what I've been able to do is study parts of the lunar surface that we've never explored

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humans have never been, and try to better understand how the Moon has evolved both over billions and billions

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of years.

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My father was an engineer in the 1960s and worked on the Apollo

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project. He build various components for the

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lander and for the backpack that the astronauts wore.

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So even from an early age, sort of NASA was something

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that I was familiar with and kind of

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intrigued by. Going on to high school I got very interested in

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geology, Earth Science. And

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from a very early age in high school thought, "Oh, okay

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I want to study rocks, I want to study geology,

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I went to college I had a professor there who sort of

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said, "Well wait a minute, you like geology and you like space

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and planetary, planets, NASA stuff. You know, you can

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do the geology of the planets." I thought, "Really?"

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"Well that sounds interesting." And so I got very interested in that.

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I mean, one of the amazing things that happened to me,

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working with this instrument, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper,

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you know, we had this discovery of water on the Moon.

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And our instrument

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along with two other instruments that had passed by the Moon

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found traces, evidence for traces

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of water on the surface of the Moon. And to be, sort of in the wings

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and associated with this pretty fundamental and pretty exciting

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discovery, it was amazing. My whole family thinks that I

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have something to do with everything that NASA does, and

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no, not really, but still for me, that's a big sense of

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pride that like, hey, we do that.

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We send humans into space, or we send spacecraft to other

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planets, or we have rovers moving around on Mars,

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we do that. I've been very fortunate that

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my passions, the things that I enjoy, and

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what I do professionally, overlap quite a bit.

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So that's the best anyone

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could ask for.