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4/30/2009

MEMS professor headed to Hubble
Astronaut Mike Massimino brings a piece of Rice to famed space telescope

By MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Mike Massimino will visit an old friend this month, one he hasn’t seen for years. If all goes well, his pal will stay in touch for many years to come.

	NASA Mike Massimino, an adjunct professor in Rice’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, is one of four spacewalkers who will perform surgery on the Hubble Space Telescope 350 miles above the Earth after his launch aboard space shuttle Atlantis scheduled for May 11.

Massimino, an adjunct professor in Rice’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science (MEMS), is one of four spacewalkers who will perform surgery on the Hubble Space Telescope 350 miles above the Earth after his launch aboard space shuttle Atlantis on May 11. It will be his second spaceflight, both service missions to the Hubble. This will be the fifth and final service mission before the space shuttle fleet’s planned retirement in 2010.

To the delight of his students and associates, he’ll bring a little piece of Rice to the Hubble: a MEMS T-shirt signed by all who attended his most recent lecture here in January 2008, before training for the mission consumed all of his working hours.

“I wanted to fly something for the department, and it’s nice to bring a thing that has meaning for more than just one person and that they can display,” said the 46-year-old Massimino, a compact man with a broad smile and easy laugh. “We tossed around a couple of ideas, and we came up with the signed T-shirt. That way, their names go into space, and it gives them a personal tie to our spaceflight.”

The mission will be one of the most ambitious attempted by a shuttle crew. Over 11 days, spacewalkers will install a new wide-field camera and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, repair faulty gyroscopes and other instruments and wrap a stainless-steel thermal blanket around Hubble’s exterior. They'll also replace a control computer that failed last September and delayed the launch, which was originally scheduled for October.

NASA Over 11 days, spacewalkers will install a new wide-field camera and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, repair faulty gyroscopes and other instruments and wrap a stainless-steel thermal blanket around Hubble’s exterior.

The goal is to extend the working life of the telescope, hobbled by wear and tear, by at least five to 10 years. NASA estimates the new technology Atlantis will bring to the observatory will improve its power of discovery by 10 to 70 times.

Massimino and his extravehicular partner Michael Good will take the second spacewalk (on the fifth day of the mission) and fourth (on the seventh day). For those watching on NASA TV, Massimino will be wearing the spacesuit with broken horizontal red stripes.

This may also be one of the most dangerous missions. The fact that Atlantis will have no way to get to the international space station in an emergency has prompted NASA to prepare the shuttle Endeavor for launch if a rescue flight is needed. The agency has allayed early fears that debris from the collision of two satellites in February would affect the mission.

Massimino, who holds a doctorate in engineering from MIT and is also an adjunct professor at Georgia Tech, will return to Rice after touchdown, not only to deliver the T-shirt but also to update his associates, including MEMS chair Enrique Barrera, who plans to attend the launch.

“The students at Rice are bright, energetic and generally nice people to talk to, and the faculty’s the same way," Massimino said. "So I’m looking forward to telling them what it was like.

	NASA A recent Hubble image, Arp 194, shows three galaxies, two of them  colliding. The blue streamer in the center is a stretched spiral arm,  full of newborn blue stars. The galaxy at the bottom is in the  background and not connected. A full description appears here.

“I think it’s good for students to see how they might be able to do some cool stuff, if they’re interested in the space program and figuring out cool engineering challenges. I’ll give them some examples of how that worked on this flight.”

Massimino, who said he'd stay in the astronaut corps “until they kick me out,” is very much looking forward to stepping into the void again.

“The things I liked the most on the last flight and look forward to doing again are the spacewalks and the view of the Earth,” he said. “We talk about all this technical stuff, and that’s all good, but the experience of being out there is just incredible.”

Massimino remembered being both too busy and too nervous on his first excursion from the shuttle Columbia in 2002 to have a good look around. But on his second walk, “I had a chance to be left alone for a couple of minutes. It was a day pass, and I could view the Earth very clearly. It was right there.

“My first reaction was to look away; it was so beautiful that people weren’t supposed to see it. I actually turned my head -- I was becoming a little bit emotional. I was starting to tear up a little bit. And then I was worried about that -- I didn't want to get water in my spacesuit. So I thought, 'Geez, I've got to get myself under control.'

“The next time I Iooked, what went through my mind was, if you were in heaven, this is the way you would see our planet.

“I felt like I was looking at perfection. At paradise.”

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All Hubble, all the time

Keep up with Massimino as he tweets about preparing for his mission to the Hubble Space Telescope on Twitter.

Read a history of the Hubble Space Telescope at hubblesite.org and visit its interactive image gallery.

Read NASA updates on the launch.

See an interactive introduction to the mission.

Read about the Hubble's longest-serving scientist, Rice's Buchanan Professor Emeritus of Astrophysics Bob O'Dell.