Edward Bing Cheung, a native of Aruba, has been one of the scientists working to optimize the performance of the Hubble Space Telescope. The equipment designed by him and his team has been taken into space in four different missions of the Space Shuttle. The launching of the Hubble Space Telescope was a formidable achievement for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Background
Cheung was born on February 6,1963, in the town of San Nicolas in Aruba. He was one of three children of Kong Ming Cheung, a supermarket owner from Hong Kong, and Yok Fuir Cheung, a homemaker born in Singapore. Like many other immigrants to the Caribbean island of Aruba, his father arrived in the island when he was 23 years old, following the footsteps of his father who had been a cook in an oil tanker servicing a gas refinery in Aruba. When his tanker became stranded at the island, he got off the ship and decided to begin a new life on this Caribbean island.
Education
Cheung received his elementary education at Paulus School in his native town of San Nicolas and graduated from high school from the Colegio Arubano in Oranjestad in 1980. He migrated to the United States and enrolled at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1985. He went on to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering from Yale University, where he specialized in robotics. His doctoral dissertation, "Real-Time Motion Planning for Whole-Sensitive Robot Art Manipulators (Sensitive Skin Proximity Sensor)" (1990), studied the problems faced by motion sensors installed in robots.
Career
During his years as an undergraduate student at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Cheung became involved in many scientific and research projects. As part of the Major Qualifying Project, a graduation requirement, he built a fiber optic rotation sensor to be flown on the Space Shuttle as a student research project. While the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger derailed his research project, he didn't lose his motivation and interest in science.
At Yale he worked in the emerging field of robotics and did work on the barriers faced by motion sensors, which were used to allow the mobility of space robots. On purchasing his first home in 1991, Cheung designed a complete home automation system that allowed him to control almost every function of the house automatically, such as the phones, the doors, the alarm systems, stereo equipment, and the like. His novel work on the house was profiled in the magazine Home Automator in 1999.
Cheung joined NASA in 1991. In 1996 he became one of the scientists designing equipment to support the Hubble Telescope as part of the Solid State Recorder (SRR) Team. Despite the fact that the Hubble is a formidable machine, it requires a great deal of maintenance and upkeep. Some of its systems break down and others become obsolete. As a result, NASA has a team of engineers who provide support to the telescope by designing new and corrective equipment that is taken to space by astronauts in carefully structured missions designed to maintain the Hubble and to prolong its useful life.
Cheung has participated in the design of many important components for the Hubble. He built and tested an electronic digital recorder that stores the images collected by the Hubble before their transmission to earth. It was installed in the telescope in 1997 and its success caused a second copy to be installed in 1999. He also designed a computer named the HOST Controller that controls several functions of a cooling device for an infrared camera that scans the universe. He recently designed the A.R.U.B.A. (ASCS/NCS Relay Unit Breaker Assembly), which disconnects power to the instruments in case of a electrical problem and prevents a generalized instrument failure. The relay box was installed by astronauts in 2002 and is located outside the Hubble spacecraft. Cheung decided to name the device after the Caribbean island in order to build enthusiasm for space exploration among children in Iris homeland.