Piers Sellers

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Piers Sellers
Piers Sellers
Country: United States
Organization: NASA
selected on May 1, 1996
(16th NASA Group)
Calls: 3 space flights
Start of the
first space flight: 		October 7, 2002
Landing of the
last space flight: 		May 26, 2010
Time in space: 35d 09h 02min
EVA inserts: 6th
EVA total duration: 41h 10min
retired on 2011
Space flights

Piers John Sellers (born April 11, 1955 in Crowborough , East Sussex , United Kingdom ; † December 23, 2016 in Houston , Texas ) was an American - British astronaut and climate researcher . After Helen Sharman and Michael Foale, he was the third Briton in space and, after retiring as an active astronaut, head of the geoscientific research department at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center .

Life

Sellers was born in the south of Britain, but mostly grew up outside of their home country. His father John worked in the army and so the family moved often. So he got to know Europe , but also the Middle East .

Before he could drive a car, he learned to fly. He started gliding at the age of 15 . He made his private pilot's license two years later with the Royal Air Force . Flying jets appealed to him, but he decided against it because it would have meant signing up for many years as a professional soldier. Piers had been forced to ride a motorcycle for many years because his father wouldn't let him drive the family car; He didn't get his driver's license until he was 22.

Until 1973 Sellers attended Cranbrook Primary High School in Kent ; the Cranbrook School, as its official name, was founded in 1518; Elizabeth I was once taught there. He then studied at the Scottish University of Edinburgh , which he graduated in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in ecology . In 1981 he received his PhD in biometeorology from the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire , central England .

Sellers was a recognized scientist, a recognized expert on climate change and global warming . Quite early in his scientific career, he began to be interested in what goes on in the atmosphere and how it can be calculated using computer models. The NASA found out about it, and Sellers was shortly after he had made his doctor, an invitation to the US to this area at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Maryland to work.

Sellers, who was working as a software consultant in London at the time, accepted the offer and he and his wife moved to the United States in 1982. They arrived at Greenbelt with three suitcases and some money, and Sellers went on duty two days later. From then on he did research at the Laboratory for Terrestrial Physics of the GSFC. He was particularly interested in how the atmosphere and the biosphere influence one another. For the next 13 years he did research in the field of climate and global warming in order to understand the relationships with computer models, satellite data and exploration flights. He didn't just work from the office, however. He repeatedly went on expeditions and worked with colleagues all over the world. In Brazil, for example, he studied the influence that cutting down the tropical rainforest has on the weather. His work also took him to the desert, more precisely the Sahara . Probably the most extensive project he was involved in was in Canada . In the north of the country, research was carried out into how the climate affects the uninhabited area.

Astronaut activity

Piers Sellers on an spacecraft mission during the STS-121 space shuttle mission testing repair techniques for the space shuttle's heat shield

As a small child, Sellers was enthusiastic about space travel. He watched the flight of Yuri Gagarin the day after his sixth birthday and let his father explain everything to him. The teenager was also enthusiastic about the live images of the first moon landing in 1969. For him, an astronaut was initially not a career aspiration, but a utopia, because Great Britain does not have a manned space program. That changed when he moved to the United States. He soon began applying to NASA as an astronaut. Every year he filed his papers in Houston . His biggest obstacle was being a British citizen, so in 1991 he also became a US citizen.

Piers Sellers came with the 16th astronaut group to NASA, which with a strength of 35 candidates formed the largest group since the legendary "Thirty Five New Guys" 1978 (group 8). Sellers was one of a total of 2,432 applicants who met the formal selection criteria. This resulted in 123 finalists who visited the JSC in Houston between October 1995 and February 1996 for interviews and medical examinations. In mid-August 1996 Sellers began the two-year basic training with the 43 other candidates.

After his basic training as a mission specialist, Piers Sellers was deployed where he could bring his many years of experience - in the computer department. In 1999 he came to the still young ISS department. For the next two and a half years he worked with the Russian side on the computer program for the ISS. He shuttled back and forth between Houston and Moscow until he began flight-specific training for his first mission.

Sellers was set up for a shuttle flight for the first time in August 2001. STS-112 was conducted with the Atlantis in October 2002 and brought a $ 390 million, 14-ton lattice structure to the International Space Station (ISS). The so-called S1 boom was attached to the space station by Sellers and his colleague David Wolf during three spacecraft missions (EVAs) .

Only two months after his maiden flight, Sellers was again entrusted with a flight. Together with James Halsell as commander, Alan Poindexter as pilot, and Stephanie Wilson , Wendy Lawrence and Michael Foreman as mission specialists, he should form the crew of STS-120 . The supply flight to the ISS was planned for February 2004 and was supposed to expand the space station with the Harmony connection module . Because of the Columbia accident a year earlier, the flight planning of the shuttle program had to be changed and STS-120 was postponed by several years.

In July 2004, NASA made a small redesign of the STS-121 crew . Carlos Noriega was taken off the flight for medical reasons and replaced by Sellers. The mission was carried out in July 2006 after several postponements. The main tasks were to prove on the one hand that the improvements made to the space shuttle after STS-107 and STS-114 work, and on the other hand to supply the ISS with goods and to reinforce its two-man crew with an astronaut. Since the ISS expedition 6 , three space travelers have been working on the station again. During the two-week flight, Sellers and colleague Fossum performed three EVAs. They carried out repairs on the space station, tested a system made up of two robot arms for their structural integrity and tested a new type of filler to determine whether it was suitable for space.

Sellers took off for his third space flight on May 14, 2010 with the STS-132 . This was the penultimate flight of the space shuttle Atlantis . The landing took place on May 26, 2010. In 2011 he retired from the NASA astronaut corps. He later became director of the geoscientific research department at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center .

Private

Sellers and his British wife have known each other since college and have two children. In early 2016, he made public in The New York Times that he was fatally ill with pancreatic cancer . He combined this announcement with the call to pursue climate protection and to protect the earth from the consequences of global warming . As an astronaut, he saw from orbit "how fragile and infinitely valuable" the earth is. Even if his remaining life time is now very limited, he is still hopeful for the future of the earth. So he'll go back to his office the next day and do some more research. Sellers died of his illness on December 23, 2016 at the age of 61.

Fonts (selection)

See also

Web links

Commons : Piers Sellers  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Erik Seedhouse: Tim Peake and Britain's Road to Space . Springer International Publishing, Cham 2017, ISBN 978-3-319-57907-8 (English, limited preview in the Google book search).
  2. ↑ To Astronaut's Final Mission: Fight Climate Change and Cancer . In: National Geographic , October 20, 2016. Retrieved December 25, 2016.
  3. ^ Piers Sellers: Cancer and Climate Change . In: The New York Times , January 16, 2016, accessed December 25, 2016.
  4. ↑ Climate scientist and Nasa astronaut Piers Sellers dies aged 61 . In: The Guardian , December 24, 2016. Retrieved December 24, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Sellers, piers
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sellers, Piers John (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American astronaut
DATE OF BIRTH April 11, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Crowborough , Sussex
DATE OF DEATH December 23, 2016
Place of death Houston , Texas