Gibson, Edward

Edward Gibson, in full Edward George Gibson, (born Nov. 8, 1936, Buffalo, N.Y., U.S.), U.S. astronaut who was science pilot for the Skylab 4 mission, which established a new manned spaceflight record of 84 days.

Gibson, Edward G.

Gibson received a doctorate in engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena in 1964. The next year he was selected to be an astronaut.

Skylab 4 was launched on Nov. 16, 1973, with a three-man crew: Gibson, commander Gerald Carr, and command module pilot William Pogue. Gibson used a set of special telescopes mounted on the orbiting space station to make detailed observations of the solar corona and chromosphere beyond the interference of Earth’s atmosphere, producing much new data about the outer regions of the Sun and its activity cycle.

In 1974 he resigned from the astronaut program and became a senior staff scientist for the Aerospace Corporation, where he helped to analyze the solar data collected during the Skylab program. In 1977 Gibson rejoined the astronaut program and was assigned to the space shuttle project, but he resigned again in 1980 to enter private industry. He wrote a solar physics textbook, The Quiet Sun (1973), and two novels, Reach (1989) and In the Wrong Hands (1992).