(Noah Petro) I remember, on one of the very first days of my 9th grade Earth Science class, I had a teacher stand up with a fish tank full of water and he held up a rock and he held up a piece of wood and he asked the class, "What's going to sink and what's going to float?" Well, wood's going to float, rock's going to sink, easy, you know, it just makes sense. He put the rock in, he put the wood in, the wood sank and rock floated and I thought, my mind was blown, and I thought, "what?!" And it was essentially from there that everything else in that class was basically your assumptions can be wrong, you know, mother nature makes trees that sink and rocks that float. So let's learn why. My jaw just dropped and I thought, well that's, that's what I want to do. My name is Noah Petro and I study the surface of airless bodies in the solar system, focusing primarily on the surface of the Moon. (music kicks up) The mission that I've worked most closely with is the Chandrayaan-1 mission it was an Indian mission to orbit the Moon and I was working on one of the instruments on that mission called the Moon Mineralogy Mapper. The fun part comes when you figure out all of the problems and you can understand the limitations of your data and actually start to look at the geology of the surface of the Moon. And so what I've been able to do is study parts of the lunar surface that we've never explored humans have never been, and try to better understand how the Moon has evolved both over billions and billions of years. My father was an engineer in the 1960s and worked on the Apollo project. He build various components for the lander and for the backpack that the astronauts wore. So even from an early age, sort of NASA was something that I was familiar with and kind of intrigued by. Going on to high school I got very interested in geology, Earth Science. And from a very early age in high school thought, "Oh, okay I want to study rocks, I want to study geology, I went to college I had a professor there who sort of said, "Well wait a minute, you like geology and you like space and planetary, planets, NASA stuff. You know, you can do the geology of the planets." I thought, "Really?" "Well that sounds interesting." And so I got very interested in that. I mean, one of the amazing things that happened to me, working with this instrument, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, you know, we had this discovery of water on the Moon. And our instrument along with two other instruments that had passed by the Moon found traces, evidence for traces of water on the surface of the Moon. And to be, sort of in the wings and associated with this pretty fundamental and pretty exciting discovery, it was amazing. My whole family thinks that I have something to do with everything that NASA does, and no, not really, but still for me, that's a big sense of pride that like, hey, we do that. We send humans into space, or we send spacecraft to other planets, or we have rovers moving around on Mars, we do that. I've been very fortunate that my passions, the things that I enjoy, and what I do professionally, overlap quite a bit. So that's the best anyone could ask for. (music fades) (beeping sounds)