CHICAGO — Chicago native and University of Chicago graduate John Grunsfeld will be inducted into the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame.
Grunsfeld, who was born in Chicago and lived in Hyde Park before moving to suburban Highland Park as a child, has logged more than 58 days in space. That includes 58 hours and 30 minutes of extravehicular activity (EVA) over the course of eight spacewalks, according to a news release.
Grunsfeld was a NASA astronaut from March 1992 through December 2009, when he retired to become Deputy Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute and a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. He rejoined NASA in 2012 and serves as the agency's Associate Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at its Washington, D.C., headquarters.
Grunsfeld has been on five space flights: STS-67 Endeavour; STS-81 Atlantis; STS-103 Discovery; STS-109 Columbia; and STS-125 Atlantis. During the last three missions, he worked to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.
Grunsfeld has master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Chicago, with a bachelor's from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Grunsfeld joins Steven Lindsey, Kent Rominger and M. Rhea Seddon, M.D., as Astronaut Hall of Fame inductees.
This year's Astronaut Hall of Fame Induction will take place at 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 30 at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex’s Space Shuttle Atlantis in Cape Canaveral, Florida. For more information, visit www.KennedySpaceCenter.com.
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