Cosmic Background Explorer
Michael Ryschkewitsch earned a B.S. in physics from the University of Florida, Gainesville, and a Ph.D. in physics from Duke University. He joined the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 1982 to work as a cryogenics engineer on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission. He worked on a number of other projects, including the first servicing mission for the Hubble Space Telescope. He later served as the chairperson of the Genesis spacecraft mishap investigation board, and discovered a test that Lockheed Martin had skipped that would have prevented the mishap.