Astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason

Bjarni Tryggvason, one of Canada's original astronauts, has died at the age of 76. Selected by the National Research Council of Canada in 1983, ...

He was bestowed with the NASA Space Flight Medal for his launch in 1997, the Innovators Award of the Canadian Space Agency in 2004 and the Knight's Cross of the Icelandic Order of the Falcon. Rather than pursue another spaceflight assignment, though, Tryggvason took leave of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to work in the private sector. He was then a lecturer in applied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario from 1980 to 1982. A year after he returned from space, Tryggvason joined "The Penguins," NASA's 18th class of astronaut candidates selected in 1998. I ended up developing this electromagnetic levitation platform [and] flew that on the Russian space station, flew that on my flight [and] was involved in designing another one that is up on the space station now." He authored 50 published papers and held three patents. A kind, funny, original man." An upgrade to a similar device installed and successfully used on the former Russian space station Mir, the MIM employed magnetic actuators to levitate and isolate individual experiments. A member of the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute, Tryggvason was awarded an honorary doctorate of science from the University of Western Ontario in 1998, an honorary doctorate of technology from the University of Iceland in 2000 and honorary doctorate of engineering from the University of Victoria in 2005. "It is with profound sadness and heavy hearts that we learned that former CSA astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason has passed away," the agency wrote. "The fact that I was working on my own science experiments was really quite good," Tryggvason said in a 2015 interview (opens in new tab) with the Canadian news magazine Maclean's. "I decided to look at how fluids would behave in space. Much love."