Unbeknownst to many University of Washington students, a UW alumnus will be lifting off in his first space shuttle mission after training as an astronaut for almost 10 years.

Dr. Stanley Love, who received both a master’s and doctorate degrees from the UW’s Department of Astronomy, will be blasting off with seven other astronauts on an 11-day mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida Dec. 6 to deliver the European Space Agency’s Columbus Laboratory to the International Space Station.

“Columbus will add some much-needed lab space that’s dedicated to research,” Love said in an article by NASA.

Love is Mission Specialist 4; he also owns titles R1 and M2, which means he is responsible for robot arms on both the space shuttle and the space station when retrieving the laboratory from the shuttle and attaching it to the station. He also owns title EVA3, which means he’s the third of the three spacewalkers.

As a native of Eugene, Ore., Love researched interplanetary dust particles and their effects on Earth while studying at the UW. After graduating, Love did two different post-doctoral positions, one in Hawaii for a year and another at Caltech for two more years, before ending up at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After 7 years of applying for the Astronaut Office each year, he finally got accepted in June 1998 and has been training since August of that year. Since then he has been part of the Exploration Branch, researching and developing future space vehicles.

The STS-122 mission is his most difficult task since being accepted into the Astronaut Office. Love will be the last of the three spacewalkers to do manual installment and attachment of the lab module to the station. During his EVA (extravehicular activity), Love will be linking a solar telescope and doing the final detailed securities of the laboratory to the station. In a preflight interview, when asked about the dangers of the mission and why it’s worth all the risks, Love responded, “Exploration, as I’ve said, I think it’s important. … [W]hen we explore we find things, and it can be dangerous, and what we find may be strange and useless at the time, but as time runs it always becomes very valuable.”

The STS-122 shuttle is scheduled to launch Dec. 6 and will return 11 days later after the mission is successfully completed.

[Reach reporter Ben Schock at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]