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Christine Chiodo served as a backup Operations Lead (Ops Leads) in Russia during Phase 1. She assisted the primary Operations Leads for Increments 3 - 7. Ops leads were responsible for coordinating communications between the US-Mir astronauts, NASA, and Russia from the Russian Mission Control Center (TsUP). They were in charge of an American team in Russia that consisted of an engineer, an operations support tech, a payloads systems engineer, a mission science representative, a biomedical engineer, a flight surgeon, and a public affairs representative.
Chiodo was also a member of the consultant group that went to Russia for STS-71, the first Shuttle-Mir docking mission, which is the trip that sparked her interest in working as an Ops Lead. In her Oral History, Chiodo described her roles as an Ops Lead:
"We managed a team of folks to kind of be the eyes and ears for the astronauts onboard. It involved things like keeping them up-to-date on what their schedule was going to include, any changes to activities, changes to experiments, passing information about experiments back to the payload developers, taking care of scheduling press events, things like that.
"So it was a little bit of everything over there. We also talked with the astronauts a couple times a day, just trying to keep them up-to-date on what was going on in the world, both within NASA and outside of places," she said.
Prior to her Phase 1 duties, Chiodo was a Space Shuttle Flight Activities Officer, or FAO, a mission control console position involving the development of the crew timelines for shuttle missions.
Christine Chiodo Oral History (PDF)
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Curator:
Kim Dismukes
Responsible NASA Official: John Ira Petty