OBSERVATIONS FROM SCOTLAND                            13_May 2008                                GM1SXX

Ron Parise WA4SIR SK

Ronald (Ron) A. Parise, WA4SIR, passed away on Friday May 9, 2008 after a long battle with cancer. He was 57 years old. Like many other attendees, I was lucky enough to meet Ron in person when he attended an AMSAT Colloquim at the University of Surrey.  Ron was a good storyteller and was kind enough to sign a couple of AMSAT-UK  T-Shirts for LA2QAA and myself. In fact, he signed a fair number of T-Shirts that night for the delegates. From memory, it was the 1999 colloquium, but G3RWL needed to 'offload' some 'left-over' T-shirts from 1998 so what better way than to coerce an astronaut to sign them first!

Ron flew as a payload specialist on two space shuttle missions  STS-35  on board Columbia in December 1990 and on STS-67 onboard Endeavour in March 1995.  He was an astronomer trained by NASA as an astronaut.  His  two missions, ASTRO-1 and ASTRO-2, carried out ultraviolet and x-ray astronomical observations, and his two shuttle flights logged more than 614 hours and 10.6 million miles in space. He was one of the first people to operate a telescope from space.

Ron was first licensed aged 11, and was a keen amateur radio operator, including his amateur radio operation from space, when he made hundreds of contacts  via the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment (SAREX).

He was a great ambassador for amateur radio and will be sadly missed.

73 AL.
GM1SXX