Jay Buckey, Dartmouth Medical School professor and NASA astronaut, surprised the Dartmouth Outing Club yesterday with a DOC patch he had carried with him during his trip into space.
"What better outing than to go really, really far and take a part of the outing club with you," Buckey said at the DOC board meeting yesterday when he presented the patch.
Buckey's "outing" was actually 6.3 million miles long at an altitude of 170 miles, as the payload specialist on board the Space Shuttle Columbia. Buckey and the rest of the crew orbited the Earth for 17 days last April.
The patches were given to Buckey by former DOC Vice President Kevin Hand '97.
Hand, who worked as an intern at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration last summer, introduced Buckey and told the story of when he sent Buckey a letter in the fall of 1997, and included a few DOC patches -- intending them to be given to Buckey's children.
"I don't think his children ever ended up seeing those patches," Hand joked. "They went on a bit of a different journey."
Buckey, who said he and his family are members of the outing club, presented the patch matted with pictures of his trip into space.
DOC President Ben Berk '00 said the patch and pictures will be framed and hung in the DOC meeting room in the basement of Robinson Hall.
Buckey's voyage was "a true DOC outing," Berk said. "He took the DOC to new heights."
Berk said none of the DOC's members knew that Buckey carried the patch into space until the presentation yesterday afternoon.
While on board the Neurolab, which carried over 2,000 animals, Buckey and his crew mates experimented on the animals and themselves in order to obtain information about the effects from space on the nervous system.
The information will be used in possible future missions to Mars which would necessitate long-term stays in space by astronauts.
Buckey also took time on board the Space Shuttle to speak to College students in a 10-minute teleconference. With a green Dartmouth banner floating in the background, Buckey answered pre-arranged questions from seven students from the College.
