Monday, September 14, 2009

NASA Hubble repair mission- meeting the "Repair man" of Hubble

During the school year time is scarce. It has to be hunted for and captured like an elusive animal. However, despite this crisis of time, I still managed to go to a three hour lecture given by astronaut John M. Grunsfeld at a local hotel. It was worth every second. Grunsfeld and his team had just returned from a mission to repair and re modify the Hubble space telescope, making this latest mission Grunsfeld's fifth time in space. Grunsfeld modestly calls himself "the repair man of Hubble", though I can't think of any other repair men who attended MIT and later Cal Tech.

I found Dark Matter to be the most interesting topic of discussion tonight, and it brought me back to the good old days of seventh grade me visiting the Stanford Astrophysics and Cosmology center, and spending the entire time talking with a freshman at Stanford about Dark Matter and Energy.

Grunsfeld's arm was in a sling, after his space suit pulled his arm when working on the Hubble recently. Essentially John Grunsfeld has achieved every supermarket shopper's goal: having the best answer to the question you're asked at the checkout line: "So, what happened to your arm?".

"Oh, you know, just pulled it while replacing CCD cameras on a space telescope the other day. No big deal."

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