Hubble “on the Road” for 18 years and Counting

Hubble’s 100,000 orbit of planet Earth occurred last week on August 8, more than 18 years after the telescope’s launch and 4.3 billion orbital kilometers of travel. To celebrate, astronomers took the long-awaited chance to to grab a stunning image of a starbirth region near a star cluster in the Milky Way Galaxy.

It was also 18 years ago this month that I was working as a sort of “junior” member of one HST’s instrument teams. We’d had a pretty rough summer that year, what with the discovery of spherical aberration in the telescope’s main mirror and a host of assorted difficulties that, in retrospect, could plague any orbiting mission at the time. It was not a great time, but even then, there were solutions on the drawing board that would allow us to get the maximum amount of science from the telescope. And, as most everybody knows, the telescope survived and has gone on to greater and greater things, all due to the technical ingenuity of a lot of really dedicated people.

Indeed, that August, despite the ongoing press characterization of HST in the worst possible terms, scientists released an amazing image of Saturn (right), showing that the telescope could indeed do decent science, as hobbled as it was. I think that was about the time I decided that somehow I was going to write a book about HST and talk about what was really happening with the orbiting observatory. It took a few years, but I managed it, writing Hubble Vision (in two editions, both of them available from time to time) with great mutual support and enthusiasm of my advisor and co-author, John C. Brandt (who is retired now, but nonetheless still stirring the astronomy pot from his perch at the University of New Mexico (where he has been teaching and doing research even as he takes lots of time out for hiking and cruises)). After we got done with those two, we turned around and wrote a general astronomy book called Visions of the Cosmos that benefitted greatly from HST images (as well as some stunners from a bevy of space- and ground-based observatories).

It’s really kind of mind-blowing to look back on those times (which to me seem like they weren’t that long ago) and realize just how much this telescope has done; what it has contributed to astronomy research. Without its imaging and data, much of what we know about astronomy–in particular the distant universe–might still be hovering on the edges of detection. HST has spurred some advancements in detection and data-processing techniques, and seems also to have instigated some improvements that have benefitted ground-based technologies, too.

So, I propose a toast to our long-traveling HST, which is about to get its last and most wonderful upgrade in a few months. Long may it sail overhead, giving us unprecedented peeks across space and time!