Debbie Rahn

Headquarters, Washington, D.C. October 12, 1994

(Phone: 202/358-1639)

RELEASE: 94-169

GUIDONI NAMED TO CREW OF TETHERED SATELLITE REFLIGHT

Italian scientist Dr. Umberto Guidoni has been selected

to fly as payload specialist on the STS-75 Space Shuttle
mission in early 1996, which will see the second flight of the
Tethered Satellite System (TSS).

As payload specialist, Guidoni will serve on the Shuttle

crew as a scientist in orbit, working directly with the TSS
experiments to be conducted during the 13-day mission aboard
the Orbiter Columbia.

The TSS project is a joint NASA/Italian Space Agency

effort to study and advance the potential future uses for space
tethers, which keep one object attached to another while in
orbit and offer a variety of applications.

Guidoni will be making his first space flight, but he has

been associated with the TSS project for several years. He was
the alternate payload specialist for the first TSS mission in
the summer of 1992. He is a co-investigator on one of the
experiments to be conducted during the tether operations on the
mission, which NASA has designated TSS-1R. Since being named
experiment project scientist in 1989, he has been responsible
for integration of the Research on Electrodynamic Tether
Effects investigation into the TSS satellite.

Guidoni, 40, holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics, earned from

the University of Rome in 1978. He has served as a staff
scientist in the solar energy division of the Italian National
Council for Renewable Energy, and became senior researcher at
the Space Physics Institute of the National Research Council in
1984.

He received a post-doctoral fellowship from the Italian

Nuclear Energy National Committee for 1979-80, allowing him to
pursue work in the thermonuclear fusion field.
 During the STS-75 mission, operations with the TSS will
emphasize study of the electrodynamic effects of moving a
conductive tether through the Earth's magnetic field. During
the first TSS mission, STS-46 in July and August 1992, the
satellite was partially deployed and was successfully managed
and manipulated by Shuttle crew members.

-more-
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The TSS project is managed for NASA's Office of Space

Science and the Office of Space Flight by the Marshall Space
Flight Center, Huntsville, AL. The five-foot diameter (1.6
meter) satellite, designed to be deployed at the end of a 13-
mile-long (20.7 kilometer) conductive tether, was developed and
provided by the Italian Space Agency.

The STS-75 mission also will be the third flight of the

U.S. Microgravity Payload (USMP-3), a suite of instruments and
experiments in the Shuttle's cargo bay.

-end-

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