Michael Lampton

Michael Logan Lampton (born March 1, 1941) is an American astronaut, founder of the optical ray tracing company Stellar Software, and known for his ground-breaking paper on electroacoustics with Susan M Lea, The theory of maximally flat loudspeaker systems.

Personal
Born March 1, 1941 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Married to Dr. Susan M. Lea with one daughter. He is a U.S. citizen.

Education

 * Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from CalTech, 1962
 * Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California-Berkeley, 1967

SNAP Project
Lampton has been heavily involved with the SNAP project. SNAP, the Supernova/Acceleration Probe, will study exploding stars called supernovae, as well as the gentle smearing of the light from distant galaxies due to gravity — called weak gravitational lensing — and put limits on what may or may not be the force driving the outward pull on the Universe. SNAP will investigate over one thousand square degrees of sky with a 500 megapixel camera.

SNAP is part of the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM), which is a cooperative venture between NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy. SNAP collaborators John Mather and George Smoot were awarded the 2006 Nobel prize in physics.

Career with NASA
Lampton was a NASA astronaut from 1978–1992. Below is a list of the missions he was a part of.

Pranks
In 1961, while Lampton was attending Caltech he was one of the "Fiendish Fourteen", 14 students responsible for the Great Rose Bowl Hoax.