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Home > Featured Stories > Innovation and Discovery > March 2008 > CVM Professor Blasts OffLinnehan, Space Shuttle Endeavour in Orbit
This is Dr. Rick Linnehan's fourth space mission.
The Space Shuttle Endeavour, with Mission Specialist and NC State University Visiting Assistant Professor Dr. Rick Linnehan, is in orbit. The 16-day mission will feature five spacewalks – three involving Linnehan – to continue the expansion of the orbiting international space station.
Linnehan is a visiting assistant professor in the CVM Environmental Medicine Consortium. Following his 1985 graduation from the Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine, he entered private practice as a small animal/exotics veterinarian. He then accepted a two-year joint internship in zoo animal medicine and comparative pathology at the Baltimore Zoo and The Johns Hopkins University.
After completing his internship, Linnehan was commissioned as a Captain in the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps and reported for duty in early 1989 at the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego, California as chief clinical veterinarian for the U.S. Navy's Marine Mammal Program. During his assignment at the Naval Ocean Systems Center, Linnehan initiated and supervised research in the areas of cetacean and pinniped anesthesia, orthopedics, drug pharmacokinetics, and reproduction.
He was selected by NASA in 1992 and completed his Astronaut Candidate Training, qualifying him for space shuttle assignments as a mission specialist.
The seven-person Endeavour crew will deliver the first segment of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's massive Kibo Laboratory Complex as well as the Canadian Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator, a unit featuring two smaller robotic arms that attach to the Candarm2, the orbiting station's larger robotic arm. Linnehan's space walks will involve assembling the robotic arm component.
STS-123 is commanded by Navy Captain Dominic Gorie with Air Force Colonel Gregory Johnson serving as pilot. In addition, the crew also includes Air Force Major Robert Behnken, Navy Captain Michael Foreman, Astronaut Garret Reisman and Japanese Astronaut Takao Doi. The mission marks NASA's second shuttle flight dedicated to space station construction this year. Reisman will remain on the international space station and European Space Agency Astronaut Leopold Eyharts will return to Earth.
This is Linnehan's fourth space mission. He has logged more than 43 days in space and Extra Vehicular Activity, or space walks, totaling 21 hours and nine minutes. In 1996, he flew on STS-78, the Life Sciences and Microgravity Spacelab (LMS) mission aboard Space Shuttle Columbia. The 17-day flight included studies sponsored by 10 nations and five space agencies, and was the first mission to combine both a full microgravity studies agenda and a comprehensive life sciences payload.
In 1998, Linnehan served as the payload commander on STS-90, the 16-day Neurolab mission aboard Columbia that was dedicated to 26 individual life sciences investigations on the effects of microgravity on the brain and nervous system.During STS-109 aboard Columbia in 2002, he performed three of the five space walks to service the Hubble Space Telescope. The successful mission left Hubble with a new power control unit, improved solar arrays, the new Advanced Camera for Surveys, and an experimental refrigeration unit for cooling the dormant Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer.