Portal:1980s/Selected biography/17
Sally Ride, female astronaut.
Center for International Security and Arms Control, then at the University of California, San Diego as a professor of physics, primarily researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She served on the committees that investigated the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, the only person to participate on both. Ride died of pancreatic cancer on July 23, 2012.
The elder child of Dale Burdell Ride and Carol Joyce (
Los Angeles, California. She had one sibling, Karen "Bear" Ride, who is a Presbyterian minister. Both parents were elders in the Presbyterian Church. Ride's mother had worked as a volunteer counselor at a women's correctional facility. Her father had been a political science professor at Santa Monica College
.
Ride attended Portola Junior High (now
X-rays with the interstellar medium. (Full article...
)