Mission Specialist

A Mission Specialist (MS) is a position held by certain NASA astronauts during Space Shuttle missions. A Mission Specialist is assigned to a limited field of the mission, such as for medical experiments or technical quests.

Other functions on board are Pilot, Flight Engineer and Mission Commander. Some Space Shuttle missions included Payload Specialists in addition to Mission Specialists. While a Payload Specialist was selected for a single specific mission, a Mission Specialist was selected as an astronaut first, and then assigned to a mission.

Mission Specialist is abbreviated by NASA as MS.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

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Individual
featured missions

Past	COBE Apollo 11 Mercury 3 Mercury 6 Magellan Pioneer 10/11 Voyager 1/2 Galileo WMAP WISE Space Shuttle

Currently operating	MRO Mars Odyssey MESSENGER Dawn New Horizons Kepler International Space Station Hubble Space Telescope Spitzer RHESSI SWIFT GALEX THEMIS Mars Exploration Rover Cassini GOES 14 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter GOES 15 RBSP SDO Aquarius Juno GRAIL MSL NuSTAR

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Famous quotes containing the words mission and/or specialist:

“When you’re dealing with monkeys, you’ve got to expect some wrenches.”
—Alvah Bessie, Ranald MacDougall, and Lester Cole. Raoul Walsh. Captain Nelson, Objective Burma, giving a subaltern a mission (1945)

“He was no specialist except in the relation of things.... He took most of his materials at second hand.... But no matter who mined the gold, the image and superscription are his.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)