Astronaut Edward (Ed) Lu, the veteran of three space missions who has logged 206 days in space, will visit the Cornell University campus Friday, June 11, to deliver the 2004 Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Lecture during the university's Reunion weekend.

The lecture, at 3 p.m. in Newman Arena of Bartels Hall, will have as its title "Rocketships, Asteroids, Dinosaurs and Immortality." The public is invited to attend without charge.

Lu graduated from Cornell — where he was a presidential scholar and a member of the wrestling team — in 1984 with a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering. He went on to earn his doctorate in applied physics from Stanford University in 1989.

Since then he flew as a mission specialist on the space shuttle in 1997, meeting and docking with the Russian space station Mir; as a mission specialist and payload commander on the shuttle in 2000, preparing the International Space Station (ISS) for the arrival of the first permanent crew; and, in April 2003, spending six months overseeing ISS science operations, and returning to Earth Oct. 27, 2003. He was the first American astronaut to be launched and return in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Lu is a research physicist working in the fields of solar physics and astrophysics and has developed a number of theoretical advances in the understanding of the physics of solar flares. He has published articles on a wide range of topics, including solar flares, cosmology, solar oscillations, statistics mechanics and plasma physics.

He became particularly familiar to Cornell students last September when he spoke to members of the Cornell Amateur Radio Club via shortwave radio from the ISS, some 240 miles above Earth as it passed over North America. The hookup was part of NASA's Amateur Radio Onboard the ISS program. He also called back to the campus from the ISS in October 2003 as President Jeffrey Lehman was celebrating his inauguration at Barton Hall. Lu and Lehman chatted for 5 minutes, courtesy of NASA, and Lehman invited the astronaut to visit the campus when he returned to Earth.