Michael R. Clifford

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Michael R. Clifford bigraphy, stories - Astronauts

Michael R. Clifford : biography

October 13, 1952 –

Michael Richard Uram "Rich" Clifford (born October 13, 1952), is a former United States Army officer and NASA astronaut. Clifford is considered a Master Army Aviator and has logged over 3,400 hours flying in a wide variety of fixed and rotary winged aircraft. Clifford retired from the U.S. Army at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He has logged over 12 hours of spacewalk time over three Space Shuttle missions. He is also one of the first people to conduct a spacewalk while docked to an orbiting space station. The spacewalk was conducted during STS-76, while docked at the Russian space station Mir.

Education

Graduated from Ben Lomond High School, Ogden, Utah in 1970; received a Bachelor of science degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York in 1974, and a Master of science degree in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1982.

Spaceflight experience

Clifford first flew on the crew of STS-53 which launched from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on December 2, 1992, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. The mission carried a Department of Defense payload and a variety of secondary payloads. Clifford was responsible for operating a number of experiments which included the Fluid Acquisition and Resupply Experiment (FARE) and the Battlefield Laser Acquisition Sensor Test (BLAST). FARE was a microgravity fluid transfer experiment designed to evaluate improved spacecraft propellant tanks. BLAST was a hand-held laser energy detector designed to detect and interpret a data message in a low-power Earth-based laser. After completing 115 orbits of the Earth, STS-53 landed at Edwards Air Force Base, California, on December 9, 1992.

He next served aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour on the STS-59 Space Radar Laboratory (SRL) mission which launched April 9, 1994. SRL consisted of three large radars, SIR-C/X-SAR (Shuttle Imaging Radar C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar), and a carbon monoxide sensor that were used to enhance studies of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. The imaging radars operated in three frequencies and four polarizations. This multispectral capability of the radars provided information about the Earth’s surface over a wide range of scales not discernible with previous single-frequency experiments. The carbon monoxide sensor (MAPS) used gas filter radiometry to measure the global distribution of CO in the troposphere. Real time crew observations of surface phenomena and climatic conditions augmented with over 14,000 photographs aided investigators in interpretation and calibration of the data. The mission concluded on April 20, 1994, with a landing at Edwards Air Force Base after orbiting the Earth 183 times in 269 hours.

Clifford next served on STS-76, the third docking mission to the Russian space station Mir, which launched on March 22, 1996 with a crew of six aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis. Following rendezvous and docking with Mir, the transfer of a NASA Astronaut to Mir for a five month stay was accomplished to begin a continuous presence of U.S. astronauts aboard Mir for the next two-year period. The crew also transferred 4,800 pounds of science and mission hardware, food, water and air to Mir and returned over 1,100 pounds of U.S. and ESA science and Russian hardware. Clifford performed a 6-hour spacewalk, the first while docked to an orbiting space station, to mount experiment packages on the Mir docking module to detect and assess debris and contamination in a space station environment. The experiments will be retrieved by a future shuttle mission. This mission was also the first flight of Kidsat, an electronic camera controlled by classroom students via a Ku-band link between JSC Mission Control and the Shuttle, which uses digitized photography from the Shuttle for science and education purposes. Following 145 orbits of the Earth, Atlantis landed with a crew of five at Edwards Air Force Base in California on March 31, 1996. He was diagnozed with Parkinson’s disease in 1994, but only his commander, Kevin Chilton, knew about it. After the STS-76 mission Clifford decided that he shouldn’t fly, because he didn’t know how fast it was going to progress.