OCS Seminars
Mike Massimino: Servicing the Hubble Space Telescope
Former astronaut Mike Massimino described his work on the final mission to service the Hubble telescope.
Abstract:
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and was serviced by astronauts on board the space shuttle five times. This talk will focus on the final Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission, STS-125, which took place in May 2009 on board space shuttle Atlantis. During that mission, the crew upgraded the telescope through a series of five spacewalks, setting a record for space walking time on a single space shuttle mission. The spacewalks included the first ever repair in place of Hubble science instruments.
Biography:
Mike Massimino served as a NASA astronaut from 1996 to 2014. A veteran of two space flights to the Hubble Space Telescope, Mike and his crews set team records for spacewalking time, and he became the first person to tweet from space. He has played himself on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, was featured in the IMAX film Hubble 3D, and has appeared frequently in television documentaries and on late-night talk shows and news programs. A graduate of Columbia University and MIT, Mike currently lives in New York City, where he is a professor at Columbia and an advisor at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. He is the author of Spaceman: An Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe, published by Crown Archetype in October 2016.
