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Credit: NASA

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Commemorative cover of mission STS-125, signed by Megan McArthur (from the collection of Umberto Cavallaro)

Katherine Megan McArthur was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 30, 1971, but she feels that she doesn’t have a hometown, as she grew up around airplanes and airbases. Following her father, who, as a career naval officer based on the Moffet Field Naval Air Station, had temporary duty assignment in different countries, her family moved through California, which she considers her home state, but also to Japan, to England, and to Rhode Island. She graduated in 1989 from the Francis High School in Mountain View near Moffet Field, California. She says:

“For a number of years we lived at Moffett Field Naval Air Station, which is also where the Ames Research Center is, when I was in high school, and we used to see astronauts come out there to do training in one of the simulators there and they’d park their T-38s out there on the ramp, and I thought that looks like a pretty neat job. But mostly it made me interested in the space program in general, because that seemed like kind of a long shot to ever get selected to be an astronaut . I studied aerospace engineering in college and got interested in some other things along the way, but always came back to the idea of being an astronaut . What appeals to me about it, I think, it’s a challenging job. You are having to know lots of different things. You have to be a generalist as well as a specialist in some areas, and, of course, it’s a lot of fun.”

Megan went to the University of California in Los Angeles, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering in 1993, and there she fell in love with the ocean after she was required to become scuba-certified in order to participate in human-powered submarine races with other engineering students who had built a small two-person pedal-powered submarine. She recalls:

“Towards the end of my studies at UCLA I got interested in a project with some other aerospace engineering students that was called ‘Human Powered Submarine Project’ and basically we built a small two-person submarine, and raced it against some other colleges and, it’s kind of funny that a bunch of aerospace engineering students got interested in this but a friend of mine Derek, who was going into the Navy as a submarine officer, had read about this project and decided he wanted to participate. And, as part of that project I ended up being the pilot because, as the only girl, I was the smallest and the only one that would fit in the spot that we had designated for the pilot. I had to get scuba certified in order to do this project. And so I got interested in ocean engineering at that time and ended up working for a few months, at an ocean engineering company that designs underwater robots and some manned submersibles as well. Then I went to Ireland actually, for a few months, and I worked in a dive shop. That was a lot of fun. I loved being around the ocean.”

Megan set out to find a way to combine her new “ocean” passion with her engineering background. She found Hodgkiss’ lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a graduate school for oceanography that had a program called “Applied Ocean Sciences.” There she conducted graduate research in near-shore underwater acoustic propagation and digital signal processing. Her research focused on determining geoacoustic models to describe very shallow water waveguides using measured transmission loss data in a genetic algorithm inversion technique. She served as chief scientist during at-sea data-collection operations, and planned and led diving operations during sea-floor instrument deployments and sediment-sample collections. She also actively cooperated in in-water instrument testing, deployment, and maintenance, and in the collection of plants, animals, and sediments.

While at Scripps, Megan also volunteered at the Birch Aquarium, conducting educational demonstrations for the public from inside a 70,000-gal exhibit tank of the California Kelp Forest, where she dived for in-water tank maintenance, animal feeding, and observations. She also served as a volunteer in CHiPS (Committe for Humanity and Public Services), founded in those years by students at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for the purpose of encouraging and facilitating student involvement in community services like water-quality monitoring, plant salvage, revegetation, and bank stabilization. Before completing her doctorate, she also applied to become an astronaut . She says:

“I did that for six years but always held on to this idea that being an astronaut would be pretty exciting and pretty challenging. And so at one point during my graduate career I went ahead and applied to NASA and just got really lucky and got interviewed and got hired.”

Selected as a mission specialist by NASA in July 2000, Megan reported for training in August 2000. In 2002, she completed 2 years of training and evaluation, and also completed her Ph.D. and was ready to be assigned to the Astronaut Office Shuttle Operations Branch working technical issues on Shuttle systems in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL ). In 2004, she served as the crew support for Expedition-9. During this mission, she spent 6 months in Russia, from April to October 2004. She also worked in the Mission Control Center as a CapCom (capsule communicator) during several International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle missions. Her first flight into space was aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis STS-125. She says:

“I was one of the last people to find out. That week I was actually working in Mission Control Center and I was working the night shift, so I wasn’t going into my office at all. The chief of the Astronaut Office, Steve Lindsey had been calling me at my desk and, of course, I wasn’t there. And so the word was getting out amongst the crew. It happened that I ran into our pilot on the crew, who I see occasionally, and he said “Have you talked to Scooter lately?” He is not somebody I would see very often or talk to on a regular basis. That was very suspicious to me, but I had to go and work a shift in Mission Control and hadn’t time to ask more. But when I got home that night and my phone rang and it was Steve Lindsey, I finally knew what was going on.”

STS 125 was the fifth and final Shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. During the ascent-and-return phase, Megan operated as flight engineer, but her primary responsibility as mission specialist was to grasp the Hubble Telescope and place it in the payload bay of the Shuttle, and then to operate the robotic arm to stabilize and assist astronauts servicing the Hubble during five spacewalks conducted by Andrew Feustel, Michael Good, John Grunsfeld, and Michael Massimino to “perform impossibly hard, never-before-attempted ‘brain surgery’ on this one-of-a-kind telescope, a telescope that will help unlock the secrets of the universe,” as Megan wrote in an article. In a pre-flight interview, she explained:

“This is the fifth servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, and what we’re going to do is basically extend the life of the telescope for another five years at least, hopefully. We’re also going to repair it by capturing the telescope and placing it in the shuttle’s payload bay, and then some of our crew members will do five different spacewalks to do this repair and upgrade work. I’ll be driving the robotic arm for all of the EVAs. At the end we’ll use the robotic arm to move it away from the orbiter and do a series of burns to get farther away from it.”

The 19-year-old telescope spent 6 days in the Shuttle’s cargo bay undergoing vital repairs, including some to equipment that was never designed to be fixed in space. The crew overcame frozen bolts, stripped screws, and stuck handrails to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope with rejuvenated scientific instruments, two new instruments (the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph), new batteries, new gyroscopes, and a new computer. Megan was the last person to have their hands on the Hubble Space Telescope. She has logged almost 13 days in space, so far. She hopes to visit the ISS soon. In the meantime, she works with two US commercial companies that have a contract with NASA to deliver unmanned cargo to the ISS: “I work with those companies to give them input on how the crews will use those vehicles and how they’ll operate in them.”

In 2012, Megan took part as a NASA representative in a Crew Equipment Interface Test inside the Dragon capsule at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) located in Florida. “CEIT” tests are an activity that dates back to the Space Shuttle program, when it provided a training opportunity to assess the compatibility of partners’ equipment and systems with the procedures to be used by the flight crew and flight controllers and to familiarize astronauts with the actual hardware that they would use in space.

Megan is married to fellow astronaut Robert L. Behnken and they have one son.