Spaceflight Experience
STS-109 Columbia (March 1–12, 2002). STS-109 was the fourth Hubble Space Telescope (HST) servicing mission. The crew of STS-109 successfully upgraded the Hubble Space Telescope leaving it with a new power unit, a new camera (the Advanced Camera for Surveys), and new solar arrays. STS-109 set a record for spacewalk time with 35 hours and 55 minutes during 5 spacewalks. Massimino performed two spacewalks totaling 14 hours and 46 minutes. STS-109 orbited the Earth 165 times, and covered 4.5 million statute miles in over 262 hours and 10 minutes.
STS-125 Atlantis (May 11–24, 2009) was the final Hubble servicing mission by the Space Shuttle. Atlantis landed in California after stormy weather prevented the shuttle from landing at NASA's home base in Florida as previously planned. During the mission Massimino became the first person to use Twitter in space. Rather than using the service directly while on-orbit, however, Massimino composed his messages and shared them with Mission Control which then posted the messages via the Internet to Twitter. Massimino's public updates about his training for the STS-125 mission began April 3, 2009 and he remains active on the service as of July 2011.
Read more about this topic: Michael J. Massimino
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“The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational—an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)