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Philip K. Chapman
Summary
Philip Kenyon Chapman (5 March 1935 – 5 April 2021) was the first Australian-born American astronaut, serving for about five years in NASA Astronaut Group 6 (1967).
Born in Melbourne, Australia, Chapman's family moved to Sydney while he was a child. After attending the Fort Street Opportunity School (which Douglas Mawson also attended), Chapman attended Parramatta High School. He went on to earn a B.S. in physics and mathematics from the University of Sydney, in 1956. He then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, earning a M.S. in aeronautics and astronautics in 1964 and a Sc.D. in instrumentation in 1967. His doctoral thesis advisors included Nobel Laureates Steven Weinberg and Rainer Weiss.
Chapman served with the Royal Australian Air Force Reserve from 1953 to 1955. He learned to fly (in a Tiger Moth) during Australian National Service.
From 1956 to 1957, he worked for Philips Electronics Industries Proprietary Limited in Sydney, Australia. He then spent 15 months in Mawson Station, Antarctica with the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE), for the International Geophysical Year (IGY), 1958, as an auroral/radio physicist. The work required that he spend most of the winter at a remote, 2-man base, near the world's largest Emperor penguin rookery, near Taylor Glacier. Chapman explored the local area, being the first human to climb Chapman Ridge which he and his team members called Mount Rumdoodle.
From 1960 to 1961, he was an electro-optics staff engineer in flight simulators for Canadian Aviation Electronics Limited in Dorval, Quebec. His next assignment was as a staff physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in electro-optics, inertial systems at the Experimental Astronomy Lab, under the direction of Charles Stark "Doc" Draper, and gravitational theory with Rainer Weiss until the summer of 1967.
After gaining U.S. citizenship, Chapman was selected as a scientist-astronaut by NASA in August 1967.
Official source
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