Christa McAuliffe Christa McAuliffe Sharon Christa McAuliffe (born Sharon Christa Corrigan; September 2, 1948 – January 28, 1986) was an American teacher and astronaut from Concord, New Hampshire and one of the seven crew members killed in the Space Shuttle "Challenger" disaster. She received her bachelor's degree in education and history from Framingham State College in 1970 and also a master's degree in education, supervision and administration from Bowie State University in 1978. She took a teaching position as a social studies teacher at Concord High School in New Hampshire in 1983. In 1985, she was selected from more than 11,000 applicants
3352 McAuliffe a SQ-type, a transitional type between the common stony and Q-type asteroids, indicating the presence of pyroxene minerals. The "Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link" assumes an albedo of 0.18 and derives a diameter of 1.99 kilometers, based on an absolute magnitude of 16.068, a figure previously obtained by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer with its subsequent NEOWISE mission, and later revised by Czech astronomer Petr Pravec. Between 1998 and 2016, a several rotational lightcurves of "McAuliffe" have been obtained from photometric observations taken by astronomers Petr Pravec at Ondřejov Observatory, Czech Republic, by Andreas Howell at Willowcroft Observatory, Florida, as well