Michael Lampton
| Michael L. Lampton | |
|---|---|
 | |
| UC Berkeley Payload Specialist | |
| Nationality | American |
| Born |
March 1, 1941 Williamsport, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
Other occupation | Physicist, Space Sciences Laboratory |
| Missions | STS-9, STS-45 |
Mission insignia |
  |
Michael Logan Lampton (born March 1, 1941) is an American astronaut, founder of the optical ray tracing company Stellar Software, and known for his paper on electroacoustics with Susan M Lea, The theory of maximally flat loudspeaker systems.[1]
Personal
Born March 1, 1941 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Married to Susan M. Lea with one daughter. He is a U.S. citizen.[2]
Education
- Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Caltech, 1962
- Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California-Berkeley, 1967
SNAP Project
Lampton has been heavily involved with the SNAP project.[3] SNAP, the Supernova/Acceleration Probe, will study exploding stars called supernovae, as well as the gentle smearing of the light from distant galaxies due to gravity — called weak gravitational lensing — and put limits on what may or may not be the force driving the outward pull on the Universe. SNAP will investigate over one thousand square degrees of sky with a 500 megapixel camera.[4]
SNAP is part of the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM), which is a cooperative venture between NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy. SNAP collaborators John Mather and George Smoot were awarded the 2006 Nobel prize in physics.[5]
Career with NASA
Lampton was a NASA astronaut from 1978 to 1992.[2] Below is a list of the missions he was a part of.
| Year | Mission | Position |
|---|---|---|
| 1983 | STS-9/Columbia | selected and served as backup payload specialist[6] |
| 1985 | STS-51-H/Spacelab EOM 1 mission | selected as payload specialist (mission cancelled after the technical problems |
| 1986 | STS-61-K/Spacelab EOM 1-2 mission | selected as payload specialist (mission cancelled after the Challenger accident)[7] |
| 1989 | STS-45/ATLAS-1 | selected as payload specialist (the same mission as STS-61K—but renamed), replaced by backup payload specialist Dirk Frimout due to medical problems [8] |
Pranks
In 1961, while Lampton was attending Caltech he was one of the "Fiendish Fourteen", 14 students responsible for the Great Rose Bowl Hoax.
References
- ↑ "IEEE Xplore - Under Maintenance". ieeexplore.ieee.org. Retrieved 2016-07-22.
- 1 2 Joachim Becker. "Astronaut Biography: Michael Lampton". spacefacts.de. Retrieved 2016-07-22.
- ↑ "[astro-ph/0209549] The SNAP Telescope". arxiv.org. Retrieved 2016-07-22.
- ↑ http://epo.sonoma.edu/SNAP/mission/
- ↑ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 2006". nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2016-07-22.
- ↑ "home/hqnews/1990/90-072". nasa.gov. Retrieved 2016-07-22.
- ↑ "flights/sts61k". astronautix.com. Retrieved 2016-07-22.
- ↑ "NASA - ATLAS-1: The First Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Science". nasa.gov. Retrieved 2016-07-22.