By Mike Schnitzel
One man who is familiar with the sensation will be heading to space for the second time to help repair an icon of space exploration. NASA announced on Tuesday that Michael Massimino, who grew up in Franklin Square, will serve as a mission specialist on a flight to make repairs to the aging Hubble Space Telescope.
The flight is tentatively scheduled for sometime between the spring and fall of 2008. It will be NASA¹s fifth, and final, service mission to the Hubble, and it is intended to extend the telescope's operational life through 2013.
This is not the first time that Massimino has been chosen to do repairs on the Hubble, which is an international cooperative project of NASA and the European Space Agency. In 2002, Massimino was part of a seven-member crew that did routine maintenance and replaced old and damaged equipment on the telescope. That mission was nearly grounded after the crew detected a problem in the cooling system of the space shuttle Columbia. After Mission Control in Houston determined that the crew was in no danger, the mission continued as planned, and was a success.
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said that mission planners are currently working out the logistics for the latest repair-and-maintenance mission, and they plan to keep Launch Pad 39-B at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., ready for a rescue flight of another shuttle if necessary.
"We have conducted a detailed analysis of the performance and procedures necessary to carry out a successful Hubble repair mission over the course of the last three shuttle missions," Griffin said at a meeting with NASA employees at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "What we have learned has convinced us that we are able to conduct a safe and effective servicing mission to Hubble."
The crew is expected to install two new instruments on the telescope to improve its observational capabilities. A Cosmic Origins Spectrograph will use ultraviolet technology to explore the cosmic web, and a Wide Field Camera 3 will observe a wide range of wavelengths to see into galaxies beyond the Hubble's current capabilities.
"Hubble has been rewriting the astronomy books for more than 15 years," said Mary Cleave, NASA¹s associate administrator for the science mission directorate. "All of us are looking forward to new chapters that will be added with future discoveries and insights about our universe."
Massimino is one of seven astronauts who were selected for the mission. The others are Commander Scott D. Altman; Navy Reserve Capt. Gregory C. Johnson, who will serve as pilot; John M. Grunsfeld, a mission specialist along with Massimino; and first-time space shuttle crew members Andrew J. Feustel, Michael T. Good and K. Megan McArthur.
Massimino attended John Street School and H. Frank Carey High School in Franklin Square before going on to Columbia University. He spent two years as a systems analyst at IBM before attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received two patents for his work on human operator control of space robotics systems.
NASA chose Massimino as an astronaut candidate in 1996, and he was selected for Columbia¹s mission to repair the Hubble in 2000.
Comments about this story? MSchnitzel@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 265.
