Experience
A Distinguished Graduate of the USAF Academy, Dr. Jones served on active duty as an Air Force officer for 6 years. After pilot training in Oklahoma, he flew strategic bombers at Carswell Air Force Base, Texas. As pilot and aircraft commander of a B-52D Stratofortress, he led a combat crew of six, accumulating over 2,000 hours of jet experience before resigning as a captain in 1983.
From 1983 to 1988 he worked toward a Ph.D. at the University of Arizona in Tucson. His research interests included the remote sensing of asteroids, meteorite spectroscopy, and applications of space resources. From 1989 to 1990, he was a program management engineer in Washington, D.C., at the CIA's Office of Development and Engineering. In 1990 he joined Science Applications International Corporation in Washington, D.C. as a senior scientist. Dr. Jones performed advanced program planning for NASA's Solar System Exploration Division, investigating future robotic missions to Mars, asteroids, and the outer solar system.
After a year of training following his selection by NASA in January 1990, Dr. Jones became an astronaut in July 1991. In 1994 he flew as a mission specialist on successive flights of space shuttle Endeavour. First, in April 1994, he ran science operations on the "night shift" during STS-59, the first flight of the Space Radar Laboratory (SRL-1). Then, in October 1994, he was the payload commander on the SRL-2 mission, STS-68. Dr. Jones next flew in late 1996 on Columbia. Mission STS-80 successfully deployed and retrieved 2 science satellites, ORFEUS/SPAS and the Wake Shield Facility. While helping set a Shuttle endurance record of nearly 18 days in orbit, Dr. Jones used Columbia's robot arm to release the Wake Shield satellite and later grapple it from orbit. His latest space flight was aboard Atlantis on STS-98, in February 2001. Dr. Jones and his crew delivered the U.S. Destiny Laboratory Module to the Space Station, and he helped install the Lab in a series of 3 space walks lasting over 19 hours. The successful addition of Destiny gave the first Expedition Crew the largest space outpost in history and marked the start of onboard scientific research at the ISS. A veteran of four space flights, Dr. Jones has logged over 52 days (1,272 hours) in space, including 3 space walks totaling over 19 hours.
Since leaving NASA in 2001, Jones has worked as a planetary scientist and consultant in space operations. He is also an author and speaker, with four adult, non-fiction works to his credit. From 2006-2009 he served on the NASA Advisory Council. He is currently active in planning robotic and astronaut expeditions to near-Earth asteroids.
Jones is an advisor at Planetary Resources started in 2012.
Read more about this topic: Thomas David Jones
Famous quotes containing the word experience:
“The psychological umbilical cord is more difficult to cut than the real one. We experience our children as extensions of ourselves, and we feel as though their behavior is an expression of something within us...instead of an expression of something in them. We see in our children our own reflection, and when we don’t like what we see, we feel angry at the reflection.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with its hard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it—the Bovary syndrome.”
—Angela Carter (1942–1992)
“Over and over again, her own direct experience teaches a woman that when she does enough for herself, she feels better and better about her child. When she does too much for too long for her child, she feels harassed and drained. But over and over again, she lapses into doing too much.”
—Roger Gould (20th century)