Above and Beyond the Hill

DARTMOUTH IN SPACE

ASTRONAUT JAMES H. Newman '78 is scheduled for a nine-day voyage aboard the shuttle Discovery next June. He will be a NASA mission specialist responsible for operating ORFEUS, the Orbiting and Retrievable Far and Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrometer. The astron omical telescope, a joint German U.S. venture, will observe ultraviolet light from stars.

"This isn't going to help us make better microchips; this is pure science," says Newman. "By studying U-V emission from stars we hope to understand better the evolution of stars from hot gases."

Newman, who majored in physics at Dartmouth, got a Ph.D. from Rice, where his doctoral work was in atomic and molecular physics. He joined NASAin 1985 to conduct flight-crew and flight-coritrol -team training at Johnson Space Center and made the astronaut program in 1990.

Newman will start up ORFEUS and operate it during its one-week orbit, at the end of which the crew will retrieve it and return it to Earth for re-use on future missions. Along for the ride with ORFEUS will be the Interstellar Medium Absorption Profile Spectrograph (IMAPS), which will gather data about "space dust" and other interstellar matter, and an IMAX movie camera which will record panoramic footage of the Earth and the shuttle, so you may get a chance to see Newman in action on an IMAX screen near you.

Rocket Newman