Alum Massimino Returns To Earth

NASA astronaut and SEAS alumnus Michael Massimino ’84, along with six other astronauts, has returned to earth safely after a successful 11-day mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Because weather conditions at Kennedy Space Center required a two-and-a-half day wave-off, the crew of STS-125 continued to circle the globe, finally landing Sunday morning, May 24,  at 11:39 EDT at Edwards Air Force base in the California desert.

 

Massimino returned after traveling 5 million miles and logging two successful repair sessions in space with teammate Col. Michael T. Good. The second space repair session for the Massimino-Good team had its challenges, with Massimino yanking off the fourth of four handrail bolts that blocked access to the 117 screws that needed to be removed before a replacement unit could be installed. That portion of the mission was uneventful, but held the greatest threat since razor-sharp edges presented the danger of puncturing the spacesuit’s gloves.

 

 As the first NASA astronaut ever to Twitter from outer space, Astro_Mike had more than 325,000 followers as he posted his personal thoughts both before and during the mission. He wrote, "From orbit: Night pass over Australia, the city lights give stunning signs of life on our planet within the darkness of nighttime," and "From orbit: It is so beautiful up here, I wish everyone could see it."

 

On this mission, Massimino carried with him a Columbia SEAS T-shirt, signed by hundreds of students and faculty. When his schedule allows, he will return to the School, with the T-shirt in hand. During his first mission to fix the Hubble, in 2002, he carried a SEAS flag, which is now hanging in Carleton Lounge.

 

Massimino's path from Columbia Engineering to NASA Mission Specialist included advanced degrees, patents, work as a research engineer and an academician. He received MS and PhD degrees from MIT and earned two patents from research conducted on human operator control of space robotics systems in the MIT Mechanical Engineering Department's Human-Machine Systems Laboratory. As a research engineer at McDonnell Douglas Aerospace in Houston, he developed laptop computer displays to assist operators of the Space Shuttle remote manipulator system. He was an adjunct assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering & Material Sciences Department at Rice University, where he taught feedback control of mechanical systems from 1992 to 1995. In September 1995, he was appointed an assistant professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, teaching classes in human-machine systems engineering and conducting research on human-machine interfaces for space and aircraft systems. He is currently an adjunct professor at Rice University and has published papers in technical journals and in the proceedings of technical conferences.