Space is the greatest adventure of all, and all kinds of UCLA Bruins are on the mission: astronauts, astronomers, engineers and students.
It’s a roll of honor: No fewer than seven UCLA alumni have lifted off on manned space missions. In the beginning was Walt Cunningham ’60, M.S. ’61, on the first Apollo mission to carry a crew. Later, Anna Lee Fisher ’71, M.D. ’76, M.S. ’87 became the first mother in space as one of the crew on shuttle Discovery’s second flight. Most recently, Megan McArthur ’93 was the robotics expert on STS-125, manipulating the Hubble space telescope for repairs.
Dozens of unmanned NASA missions, including missions now in progress, have been supported or led by UCLA faculty members. Edward L. Wright leads WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, in its quest to catalog the sky in infrared images. Christopher Russell leads the Dawn mission; the spacecraft reached protoplanet Vesta in 2011 and had a rendezvous with dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. And in July 2014, David Paige and his team were selected to design and run a ground-penetrating radar instrument for the payload of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission.
UCLA astronomers also dare to discover. Andrea Ghez’s work in adaptive optics has led to her discoveries about star-forming regions and the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. James Larkin is principal investigator for the Infrared Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), one of the core scientific instruments of the Thirty Meter Telescope – anticipated to be the world’s most advanced telescope
Even UCLA students – especially those from the departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences – are getting into the act. They’re building an entire weather satellite on campus, with a launch spot guaranteed by NASA. And thousands of UCLA graduates work in the aerospace industry, building the spacecraft and systems that open the universe to humanity.