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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, September 14, 2009 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Photo of Jill McGuire

Jill McGuire

"HST Crew Aids and Tools: Working in Space Today and Tomorrow"

ABSTRACT -- This presentation will summarize the recently highly successful Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission 4 and will highlight many of the unique and innovative Crew Aids and Tools used by the astronauts to complete the Servicing Mission. The last part of the presentation will give an oversight into how the tools and techniques developed for HST Servicing will be applied to future In-Space Servicing.

SPEAKER -- Jill McGuire (formerly Jill Holz) has worked at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center since January 1992, and she has been with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Development Office since 1998. Following work on the Wide Field Camera 3 Team, she advanced to become the Crew Aids and Tools Manager, responsible for the design, development and qualification of a wide array of unique and specialized tools to be used by the Astronauts to service the Hubble. After the cancellation of the shuttle flight for Servicing Mission 4, Mrs. McGuire and her team had to change focus and accept the challenge of developing a totally robotic servicing mission. As a result, Jill became the Robotics Manager for the Hubble Robotic Servicing and De-Orbit Mission. She led her team in the development of a robotic system and many novel robotic tools and techniques to install new batteries and gyros, in addition to the change-out of the scientific instruments.

With Administrator Griffin’s decision to go back to Shuttle-based servicing, Jill’s team again changed direction and completed the development of tools needed for Astronauts to service the HST. (Her team will also continue the challenge of further developing dexterous robotic technologies that will benefit NASA’s current goals for human and robotic exploration.) As the Crew Aids and Tools Manager, Mrs. McGuire assisted the Astronaut crews while diving during spacewalk practice at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston. She has also supported the last three HST Servicing Missions on console in Mission Control at JSC.

Mrs. McGuire holds an M.S. in Applied Physics from Johns Hopkins University, an M.S. in Engineering Management from the University of Maryland, University College, and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of North Dakota. She holds a patent entitled "Method and Associated Apparatus for Capturing, Servicing, and De-Orbiting Earth Satellites Using Robotics." Her publications include a NASA Tech Brief entitled "Composite Material Heat Sink for Printed-Circuit Boards" and papers on other topics such as thermally stable optical benches and fabrication techniques for composite materials.




Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov