My Relationship with Hubble Space Telescope

A lot of blogs and Web pages are posting breathless headlines about Hubble Space Telescope and its 25th launch anniversary this week, along with things like the “Five Most Clickbaity Images Hubble Ever Produced”.  I thought about that, and to be honest, at first I, too, wanted a headline like “That Weird Thing Hubble Saw” or “The Most Mind-boggling, Eye-Melty, Ear-Rattling, Rip-snortin’ Image Hubble Ever Created”.

However, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to tell a simple story about my relationship with this major observatory.  Of course, I definitely have my favorite images. In fact, the one I love the most is the Orion Nebula, shown here. It just speaks to me at so many levels (scientifically and artistically). And, to be honest, I HAVE written elsewhere about the cool images from Hubble, particularly in an article about the 25th anniversary (which has links to other pieces I’ve done about the telescope).

But, this story here is more personal.

Now, I didn’t get to use the telescope to observe something (although my team did—more on that in a bit).  I wasn’t even there when it launched. But, Hubble did turn out to be a big part of my life and my career. Here’s how that happened.

My story with Hubble started when I went back to school in the late 1980s. I was thinking about working toward an astrophysics degree, but I needed to make up some undergraduate course work before I could apply to grad school. So, I went back to the University of Colorado and began taking every astronomy class I could get into, plus geology, chemistry, and physics. I took so much astronomy that one of my advisors told me I could have been qualified to get a BS degree in it (if they’d offered one at the time). Didn’t matter. I just wanted to soak up astronomy!

Upon my return to school, I was offered a job by Dr. Jack Brandt, who is a comet expert, and also was Co-Investigator for the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph instrument that was onboard Hubble for a few years. He enticed me by saying that if I stuck around, I might get to work on HST results. Well, that sounded okay by me, so I signed on the dotted line and went to work on his comet team first, and later joined the GHRS team.

In early April 1990, Jack gathered all of his students together to talk about the upcoming launch of HST. He was going to the launch, and wanted us to know what might be coming in terms of press requests, first light science, orbital verification, and so on. I decided to start collecting information about the telescope and its science. I knew that Mark and I might like to do a planetarium show about it, and a little advance research is always good. As the launch came and went, and as time went by, I read all the press reports, plus the daily updates we were getting for the team, and made lots of notes.

Sometime in late May, we had another meeting to talk about the strange images the telescope was sending back. Jack didn’t give us much info, but it was clear that something wasn’t right. In June, that was confirmed by the announcement of the spherical aberration. That’s when pandemonium broke loose: press stories, interviews, investigations, you name it, it happened. It was a very tough time, and for a while we weren’t even sure if we could do all of our science with our instrument. As it turned out, we could do much of it, but it took longer to clear the effects of spherical aberration out from the data.

Still, I kept taking notes and checking out the images over the next few months. And, it became clear to me that the telescope WAS returning images and data that WERE useful to the science teams. Yet, nobody was talking about it in the press. In fact, the press seemed to be jumping through hoops to focus on the problems of the telescope, and not so much on the actual science being done. That seemed odd to me. Little did I know that the media attention on HST would become the focus of my research a few years later.

So, Mark and I decided to go ahead and produce a planetarium show called Hubble: Report from Orbit, which was a popular presentation in the first years of HST’s mission. In 1991 we turned it into a video, which won an award for science outreach in 1992.  We then created a new Hubble planetarium show called HUBBLE Vision, which morphed into HUBBLE Vision 2 a few years later and is still popular in our catalog of shows.

Now, all along, I was still taking classes, and in 1992, I entered grad school in journalism and telecommunications engineering. I immediately decided to research the negative effects of press coverage on HST’s mission. The telecom engineering was a cool way to do applied science, and I had a blast! In 1992, Jack Brandt and I published a book about HST science called Hubble Vision: Astronomy with the Hubble Space Telescope, and it was an instant hit. We followed up a couple years later with another Hubble Vision, subtitled “Further Adventures with the Hubble Space Telescope”.

At the same time as all this work was going on, our instrument was benefiting from the servicing missions and the installation of the corrective optics that finally cleared the telescope’s vision. WE were DOING science! In 1996, we had enough results that we began planning a symposium focused solely on the science being done with the spectrograph. The following year, Jack and I and another scientist named Tom Ake put together the proceedings for that meeting, which is still around, called The Scientific Impact of the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph, and published by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1998.  By that time, our instrument had been removed from Hubble and replaced by the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). Our team had six years of ever-improving science, looking at energetic objects giving off ultraviolet light. They ranged from hot young stars to activities in the cores of galaxies and actions of exploding stars. The book and the symposium were a triumph over all the problems the team and the telescope faced in the beginning.

I graduated in 1996 with a masters’ in science journalism and telecom engineering. During my time at CU, I had studied astronomy, some graduate astrophysics and planetary science, and had actually been a working astronomer on Jack’s team—both on the GHRS team and as a comet observer and researcher. My final observations were done at the University of Hawai’i’s 2.3-meter telescope (now a student instrument) in 1996, focused on Comet Hale-Bopp.

My masters’ thesis was called The Media Treatment of the Hubble Space Telescope. There’s a copy of it on file at NASA, for which I’m quite proud.  In it, I traced the very gradual change in press attitudes toward HST, which I could track pretty accurately beginning in late 1990, when the first pretty good science images began to get attention. It took five years before press folk stopped referring to the telescope as the “troubled Hubble” and other clever (but useless) aphorisms. And today, 25 years later, the spherical aberration is just a footnote to the scads of fabulous mind-melty science that HST does every day, every orbit, without fail. Yet, it also played a role in advancing astronomy, through the creation and application of algorithms and processes to remove glitches from images and data. Since that time, I’ve played a role in advancing astronomy knowledge to the public through my writing, planetarium shows, online documentaries, and for awhile, as an editor and writer at Sky Publishing (home of Sky & Telescope).

And, it continues. I have another fulldome show in mind about Hubble science, one that will take a very unique way of showing us just what the telescope has taught us about our universe. It seems fitting, since the telescope was such a huge part of my life the past 25 years, and continues to be.

Well, that’s my story about Hubble and me. There are a LOT of us who worked with or on Hubble, and I see a lot of them sharing their stories online, too.  The HST family is a big one, spread around the world. I am proud to be even a small sprog in that amazing group.

I have a lot of people to thank for letting me be part of Hubble and share it with my readers and planetarium audiences all these years. Jack Brandt, of course, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude and friendship, as well as being a fine colleague and advisor.  My husband Mark has always pushed me to tell the HST story because he also found it so compelling. Also, the folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute, who do an amazing job of sharing HST science. And, of course, the scientists I’ve spoken with about their research (for my books and shows) and those who I’ve worked with on the GHRS team as we pushed our proposals through the pipeline and then got the data back to study.  It’s been fun to be even a peripheral part of the Hubble Family!