Piers Sellers
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Piers John Sellers (born 11 April 1955) is a Anglo-American astronaut and veteran of two space shuttle missions.
Biography
Education
Sellers, born in Crowborough, Sussex, was educated at Cranbrook School, Kent and earned a bachelor of science degree in ecological science from the University of Edinburgh and a doctorate in biometeorology from Leeds University. Sellers' work in the field of meteorology has focused primarily on computer modelling of climate systems.
Career
He and his wife left the UK in 1982, moving to Maryland in the United States. Sellers began applying to become an astronaut in 1984, but his lack of US citizenship was a problem; he became a naturalised US citizen in 1991.
Sellers was selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in 1996 and flew his first space mission aboard STS-112 in 2002. On this mission he performed three spacewalks to help install the third piece of the International Space Station structure.
His favourite band is rock group Garbage. He met the band in Houston, Texas when the band played there in April 2002. He told them he would be taking their albums into space with him. When he met the group for the second time in November 2002, he showed them a picture of their album spinning free in outerspace. He was mildly embarrassed, because the CD was in fact a Russian bootleg and not an official pressing of their album.
Sellers also took with him a copy of Cranbrook School's charter which was signed by his fellow astronauts and then presented to the school. The school's observatory, built in 2005, is named after him.
He also took a University of Edinburgh flag into space, which he presented to the university when he and his fellow crew members visited to give a talk about STS-112.
Sellers made his next spaceflight on STS-121, which launched on 4 July 2006. On July 8, Sellers with Michael E. Fossum conducted a 7 and a half hour spacewalk making a repair to the ISS and testing using the Shuttle's arm as a platform for making repairs to the Shuttle.
External links
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