US astronaut Christina Hammock Koch will be the envy of all women in the world as she becomes the first woman to go around the moon.
While men have journeyed to moon and even spent time on the lunar surface, women had till now not gone close to moon.
All that is to change now with National Aeronautical and Space Administration, USA, announcing that a four member team is going to moon next. It will have for the first time a black astronaut and also a woman astronaut.
Koch will be on board the Orion spacecraft for a trip around the Moon.
The other astronauts according to NASA are Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman.
Koch naturally in cloud nine said the mission is “awesome”
“We are going to ride the world’s most powerful rocket and we will reach peaks of thousands of miles and test all the systems and then we will head to the Moon.”
She said, they were going to carry the “world’s excitement, aspirations and dreams” on this mission to the Moon.
The Artemis II mission is a 10-day-long mission around the moon before NASA will finally go for a Moon landing mission after a gap of more than 40 years. The last time humans walked on the Moon was in 1972.
It was in 2013 that Christina Hammock Koch was selected as a NASA astronaut.
She served as flight engineer on the International Space Station (ISS) for Expedition 59, 60 and 61.
Christina Koch has a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman with a total of 328 days in space. She also participated in the first all-female spacewalk.
Koch has been assigned as Mission Specialist I of NASA’s Artemis II mission.
Belonging to Michigan she grew up in Jacksonville, North Carolina and Livingston in Montana. While in Montana she was selected to join the Astronaut Corps.
Having grown up in a farm in Michigan she naturally is used to hard work and a challenging life style. These qualities will help her in her journey to the moon as an astronaut.
She enjoys outdoor lifestyle of backpacking, rock climbing, paddling, surfing, running. She is also keen on yoga, community service, photography and travel.
She has a got Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Physics, and Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Her passion is for space science instrument development and remote scientific field engineering.
Her career began as an Electrical Engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) where she contributed to scientific instruments on several NASA space science missions.
Koch then became a Research Associate in the United States Antarctic Program which included a yearlong stay with a winter-over at the Amundson Scott South Pole Station and a season at Palmer Station. Here she also served as a member of the Firefighting and Search and Rescue Teams.
Koch then returned to space science instrument development as an Electrical Engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s Space Department where she contributed to instruments on missions including Juno and the Van Allen Probes.
Koch then returned to remote scientific field work with tours at Palmer Station in Antarctica and winter seasons at Summit Station in Greenland.
Next joining the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), she continued work at remote scientific bases, serving as a Field Engineer in Utqiagvik, Alaska and then as Station Chief of the American Samoa Observatory.
She took her first flight to space on March 14, 2019 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft with Roscosmos Cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA Astronaut Nick Hague. She returned to Earth on February 6, 2020 on the MS-13 Soyuz spacecraft with Roscosmos Cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov and European Space Agency (ESA) Astronaut Luca Parmitano. Serving as a Flight Engineer on the ISS for Expeditions 59, 60 and 61, she and her crewmates contributed to hundreds of experiments in biology, Earth science, human research, physical science and technology development.
Some of the scientific highlights from her missions include improvements to the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which studies dark matter, growing protein crystals for pharmaceutical research and testing 3D biological printers in microgravity.
Koch conducted six spacewalks, including the first three all women spacewalks, totalling 42 hours and 15 minutes.
She has spent a total of 328 days in space. She is currently serving in a rotational position as the NASA Johnson Space Center Director’s Assistant for Technical Integration.
She is the recipient of several awards including Neil Armstrong Award of Excellence, Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, 2020; Astronautics Engineer Award, National Space Club & Foundation, 2020; Global ATHENA Leadership Award, ATHENA International, 2020, among others.
| Posted by Sameer Khan | 
