UCSD GRAD MCARTHUR TO PILOT SPACECRAFT
NASA astronaut will be making her second trip into orbit
UC San Diego graduate Megan McArthur will pilot NASA’s new Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station today during her second trip into orbit.
The spacecraft was scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 5:49 a.m. EDT. The launch will be broadcast at NASA.gov.
McArthur will be accompanied by mission commander Shane Kimbrough and astronauts Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency.
She is scheduled to guide the spacecraft to a docking with the space station at 5:10
a.m. Saturday, as part of a crew rotation at the orbiting outpost. McArthur will then
spend six months as part of the station’s crew.
The docking will occur roughly one week after another UC San Diego graduate, Kate Rubins, returned from the space station, where she was conducting scientific research.
McArthur, 49, earned a doctorate in oceanography from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2002.
She was a flight engineer aboard the space shuttle Atlantis in 2009, during the final shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. McArthur used the spacecraft’s robotic arm to bring the telescope into the ship’s payload bay, where it could be inspected for damage.
A third UC San Diego graduate, Jessica Meir, also is a member of NASA’s astronaut corp. She completed a nearly seven-month stint on the space station last spring. Meir is a potential candidate for a planned mission to the moon later this decade.