Today, as I write this, it’s the 15th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery (it was actually deployed from the Shuttle a day later; you can see a fun video of it here). If you haven’t seen them already, Hubble released two new images to celebrate: one of the Eagle Nebula, and the other of Whirlpool Galaxy.
| The Eagle Nebula | M51, The Whirpool Galaxy |
I was going to write a brief history of Hubble, but you know what? You can find that anywhere. So I’m gonna indulge myself (it’s my blog, after all) and talk a little about my own involvement.
In the spring of 1990, I was at the University of Virginia, and I had just finished my Masters degree. I was looking for a PhD project, and having no luck. Most faculty had no money, or no project (one had a fantastic project observing variable stars that was incredibly cool, but she had no funding at the time). I scoured all the relevant departments at UVa, but there was literally nothing I could find.
I had actually written and printed what amounted to a resignation letter from grad school, which I was prepared to hand to the department chair, Roger Chevalier. But when I told him my tale of woe, he said “Well, I do have this one thing coming up…” I asked him what it was, and he said it was observing supernovae (exploding stars) with Hubble. I was fascinated by supernovae, and Hubble was due to launch in a few months, and was the Great Hope of Astronomy at that time. So duh: I said YES.
I still have that resignation letter.
I started reading on the project: it was a massive program to observe supernovae, involving many hundreds of hours total of observing time and a dozen professional astronomers across the globe. I was very eager to get involved, get data, gets started!
I was in for a shock, when it was found that the telescope wouldn’t properly focus (shortly thereafter I got a little salt in the wound: the variable star project I turned down received wheelbarrows full of funding. Figures). But Hubble did return two images of a ring of gas surrounding the supernova SN1987A, and they were good enough for me to start working. In all honesty, I had very little idea of what I was doing; it was a (very severe) learning process. But over time I got a grasp of it, and as new images from Hubble came in, I eagerly incorporated them into my work. I won’t go into details here, but you can read about that here and here.
I defended my PhD in ’94, and went on to eventually work on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, or STIS, a camera on Hubble. It took many grand and gorgeous images of astronomical objects, and I was privileged to work on many of them, processing and calibrating the images, and sometimes working on the scientific analysis (even publishing one project).
I left that project after nearly five years, to pursue a career in public outreach in California. I still miss the work sometimes, and got a jolt when STIS died on August 3, 2004.
But I still look back very fondly on all the fun, work, sweat, pain, torture and sheer joy of working on the world’s premier telescope. I have many other stories about Hubble, including some of the work I did, in the Bitesize Astronomy section of the main website. You may find some of them amusing (especially this one, a personal favorite).
On this, the 15th year of its pushing back the boundaries of our knowledge, let’s hope that it continues for years to come. The decision to de-orbit Hubble is not final, and Mike Griffin, the new head of NASA, has said he wants to look into a Shuttle mission to repair the ailing observatory (it has failing gyros, which stabilize its pointing, and two new cameras are sitting on the ground waiting to be installed).
I certainly hope it continues on, and provides not just the public with the thrill of its spectacular images, but also gives scientists, both young and old, a chance to expand our knowledge of the Universe. For me, that’s what this is all about.
Recent Hubble pics:
Asteroid collision!
Revisiting the Whirlpool
Vampires & thrillseekers
Happy Hubble Holidays!
April 24th, 2005 at 3:14 pm
I sure hope they’ll service Hubble, it would be a shame to lose it…
I wonder, is there any replacement for Hubble being planned?
April 24th, 2005 at 4:16 pm
I hope it stay too, they do have the james web telescope slated for launch in 2011. But there will be a period of no scope not a good idea(what if eta cairina exploded!), besides the JWST will observe in the infra red… It will be nice but not the same as something that is actually viable in colours we know.
April 24th, 2005 at 10:56 pm
Thank you, both for ‘Bad Astronomy’ and all the work with Hubble. I gotta spoil a bit and say what I’d like is better access to space so that we could have a dozen hubble’s. Furthering NASA and the shuttle fiasco just seems like throwing lives and money away. Not to mention that at the cost of the ‘Robotic Rescue’ mission we should be able to get four or five hubbles aloft. I know it’s HARD WORK, but NASA seems especially skilled in making things ten times harder.
April 25th, 2005 at 4:32 am
Thanks for replying to my original post, Phil. This one’s more on-topic rather than picking faults.
There’s a cool repository of STIS parallels at:
http://www.stsci.edu/instruments/parallels/retrieve.html which scientists are still working with, STIS’ untimely death doesn’t mean it doesn’t continue to make discoveries. Highly efficient use of the orbital resources, which Phil writes about here:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bitesize/parallel.html
His usual easy on beginners, easy to read, informative style makes a good introduction to STIS and the parallels.
Michelle Rochon: The James Webb Space Telescope is in planning but unlikely to become operational until 2011. Read more: http://ngst.gsfc.nasa.gov/
April 25th, 2005 at 11:03 am
The link to the movie is a mess,
here is a cleaned up version:
http://www.cnn.com/resources/video.almanac/1990/hubble/hubble.large.21sec.mov
April 25th, 2005 at 12:51 pm
Nuts; an extra space was added by the software in that link. I fixed it, thanks.
April 25th, 2005 at 1:30 pm
actually it was a which is a newline, but who cares? its fixed
glad to help :p
April 26th, 2005 at 10:20 pm
Why was the delay so long on the publication of that paper? It looks like about a year!
April 27th, 2005 at 9:15 am
Normandy, you mean the planetary nebula paper? It took a while to analyze the data (two months, maybe) and then more time to write the text. We submitted it to the journal, and it was initially rejected! The referee said there was not enough new material in the paper. Ironically, we submitted it specifically as what’s called a “research note”: something interesting, but not ground-breaking enough to warrant a full-sized paper in a journal. We appealed to the editors, and they agreed with us. They overruled the referee and the paper was published. I still think it was pretty cool, and I’m glad it got out there.
The central star of that nebula was 26th magnitude: the faintest star you can see with your eye at night is 100 million times brighter! Yet you could see that star easily in a single 400 second exposure. STIS was a great instrument.