Maine
Maine astronaut Jessica Meir announces birth of her 1st child
Maine astronaut Jessica Meir has given start to her first youngster.
Meir, a Caribou native, made the announcement Wednesday in a short video shared on social media to mark Worldwide Girls’s Day.
“Regardless of a pause in my coaching, my sights stay set on future missions to probe for her and all humankind,” Meir stated within the video.
Meir made historical past on Sept. 28, 2019, when she turned the primary Maine girl to enter house. Throughout her six-month mission aboard the Worldwide Area Station, Meir and her fellow astronaut Christina Koch made historical past for performing the primary all-female spacewalk, a feat they repeated a second and third time.
Meir, the valedictorian of Caribou Excessive College’s Class of 1995, was amongst three girls and 4 males chosen from 6,100 candidates in 2013 for NASA’s twenty first class of astronauts and to start coaching for future house flights. That got here solely 4 years after Meir first utilized however was rejected for NASA’s twentieth class of astronauts. NASA introduced in April 2019 that Meir would make her first house flight in September.
In some ways, Meir’s choice to affix the house program started very early in her life. Meir participated within the house camp at Purdue College in Indiana earlier than beginning her freshman yr at Caribou Excessive College, and she or he additionally took half in a six-week summer time camp on the Kennedy Area Heart in Florida between her sophomore and junior years at Brown College in Rhode Island.
Meir has a level in biology from Brown College, a grasp’s in house research from the Worldwide Area College in Illkirch, France, and a Ph.D. in marine biology from the Scripps Establishment of Oceanography in San Diego, in line with NASA.
Meir is one among Caribou Excessive College’s most distinguished graduates, together with Gregory H. Johnson, a 4 star Navy admiral; Olof Pierson, who’s credited with inventing frozen french fries; and Susan Collins, a U.S. senator. In 2016, Meir was inducted into the highschool’s Alumni Corridor of Fame.
Meir returned from her keep aboard the Worldwide Area Station in April 2020 to a planet turned the wrong way up by the COVID-19 pandemic.
She was named as one among 2020’s most influential individuals by Time journal and was inducted into the Maine Girls’s Corridor of Fame final yr.
Meir additionally has been tapped by NASA for its Artemis Staff, which has a objective of sending the primary human mission to the moon by 2024, giving her the potential to be the primary girl and first Mainer on that rock.
Meir is amongst at the very least three Maine natives to grow to be astronauts, the others being Christopher Cassidy, a York Excessive College graduate who has accomplished six spacewalks and served because the nation’s chief astronaut from 2013 to 2017, and Charles O. Hobaugh, a Bar Harbor native who has made three spaceflights. Bridget Ziegelaar, a graduate of Outdated City Excessive College, is an operations supervisor for Worldwide Area Station Analysis Integration at NASA.