Supervisor: Lisa Young
Role:
Objects Conservator
Date:
Dec. 2024-Present
Left: Fixing lighting issues on Astroland Star (photo credit: Ashley Hornish, NASM).
Treatment Highlights:
In my time at the National Air and Space Museum I was involved with all aspects of conservation’s work as part of the Transformation project of the National Mall Building. The Transformation project entailed the full renovation of all galleries in the museum, covering thousands of treatments and installations.
In addition to object treatments and consultations I served as the conservation department’s point of contact for 3 galleries and supported 5 others. As point of contact I managed cross-team communications, articulated object safety needs to mountmakers, and oversaw installations and lighting reviews.
Treatments ranged from small-scale such as the MIT/NASA SPHERES experiment to an 800 pound spectrograph from the Hubble space telescope to working on team treatments of aircraft.
Object: Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS), axial instrument from Hubble Space Telescope
Treatment: The FOS was installed on Hubble for 7 years, from 1990-7.
Treatment entailed removal of previous acrylic covers, cleaning of all internal components, and identification and removal of post-flight LED boards which were installed for display at NASA’s Goddard facility.
Object: Hubble Space Telescope engineering test article
Treatment: The model has been on display at NASM since 1996, and accumulated significant dust, oil and grime from general display and the presence of an in-house restaurant adding oil to the air.
Cleaning entailed a variety of elevated work platforms and development of a multi-step cleaning protocol to remove the various layers of build-up.
Object: Hycon 73B camera.
Treatment: This camera was installed on a U2 spy plane for surveillance operations from 70,000 feet. This model took photos which identified nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, kicking off the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Treatment required cleaning, removal of leeching plasticizes, and removal and abatement of corroded cadmium plating.
Other Work
Gallery installations; photo credit: Ashley Hornish
Sean T Portfolio and projects 