News Release

Arthur F. Davidsen
Principal Investigator
Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope

Dr. Davidsen was chairman of the local committee that worked to bring NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute to Baltimore and the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus. He was also the founding director of the university's Center for Astrophysical Sciences. He has been a co-investigator on the Hubble Space Telescope's Faint Object Spectrograph team and helped design the FOS. He served on the board that oversees the Space Telescope Science Institute for 10 years and chaired the HST Users Committee from 1990 to 1992.

He came to Hopkins in 1975 and is a graduate of Princeton University. Dr. Davidsen earned master's and doctoral degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1984, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Samuel T. Durrance
Payload Specialist
Astro-2 Mission

Samuel T. Durrance, 51, a principal research scientist in the Center for Astrophysical Sciences at Johns Hopkins, became the university's first astronaut when the space shuttle Columbia lifted off on the first Astro mission in December 1990. As payload specialist, he worked with other astronomers on board and with scientists and engineers on the ground to operate the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope and other components of the Astro Observatory.

A Tallahassee, Fla., native, Dr. Durrance received his doctorate in astrogeophysics from the University of Colorado in 1980, after doing undergraduate and graduate work at California State University in Los Angeles.

He came to Johns Hopkins as a postdoctoral fellow in 1980 and joined the HUT team in 1982; two years later, after months of tests, he was selected as a payload specialist for the first Astro mission. He had been responsible for the mechanical assembly and optical alignment of the telescope. His main astronomical interests have been the origin and evolution of planets, both in our solar system and around other stars.

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