Michael Lampton

Michael L. Lampton
UC Berkeley Payload Specialist
Nationality American
Born (1941-03-01) 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 ground-breaking 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 Dr. Susan M. Lea with one daughter. He is a U.S. citizen.[2]

Education

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 1978–1992.[6] 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[7]
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)[8]
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 [9]

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

  1. ↑ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=1162374&refinements%3D4279507687%2C4281753162%26sortType%3Dasc_p_Sequence%26filter%3DAND%28p_IS_Number%3A26092%29
  2. ↑ http://www.spacefacts.de/bios/astronauts/english/lampton_michael.htm
  3. ↑ http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0209549
  4. ↑ http://epo.sonoma.edu/SNAP/mission/
  5. ↑ http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2006/
  6. ↑ http://www.spacefacts.de/bios/astronauts/english/lampton_michael.htm
  7. ↑ http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/1990/90-072.txt
  8. ↑ http://www.astronautix.com/flights/sts61k.htm
  9. ↑ http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/factsheet/Atlas-1_factsheet.html
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