Colonel Mike Fincke, USAF (ret)
THURSDAY, 5 OCTOBER 2017, 7.30pm
UH Manoa Bilger Bldg, Room 152
Open to the public, Free admission
Colonel Mike Fincke, USAF (ret) is a spaceflight veteran with over 381 days in space and 9 spacewalks.
He will share some of his adventures in space including what daily life is aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as well as some of the groundbreaking science that has been produced on the ISS. Currently waiting for his next flight, Colonel Fincke is the lead Astronaut for the United States’ next two space ships that will take crew to the ISS, Space-X’s Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner. He will share updates on the development of those spacecraft as well as NASA’s plans to fly beyond Low Earth Orbit with NASA’s new Orion spacecraft.
Colonel Fincke was mission specialist on the penultimate Space Shuttle mission, STS-134, which launched on May 16, 2011. This flight delivered the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) instrument to the International Space Station, where it will operate until 2024.
AMS is a state-of-the-art particle detector that measures cosmic rays, antimatter and dark matter in space.
The University of Hawaii plays a big role in the data analysis of the AMS experiment.
At the Physics Department of the University of Hawaii, Professor Veronica Bindi and her team collaborate with NASA in using AMS data to improve the radiation shields for future manned missions to Mars.