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The iconic @nasa/ @esa Hubble Space Telescope was launched 30 yrs ago today on the space shuttle Discovery.
HST has made amazing scientific breakthroughs & inspired generations in ways many others will describe today.
Some words here on how it has threaded through my life.
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HST has made amazing scientific breakthroughs & inspired generations in ways many others will describe today.
Some words here on how it has threaded through my life.
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Hubble has a very long history back as far as the 1940's & Lyman Spitzer's first ideas about building an optical observatory in space. Construction by @nasa finally began in the late 1970's, with @esa as international partner.
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By the early 1980's, I was a PhD student at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, & its then director & Astronomer Royal for Scotland was Malcolm Longair. Malcom had also been a member of the Hubble science team since 1977.
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Pix: Wikipedia (Karora, Mark McCaughrean)
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Pix: Wikipedia (Karora, Mark McCaughrean)
While the Space Telescope Science Institute @stsci in Baltimore was charged with leading the science ops for Hubble, a European Coordinating Facility was also needed, & Malcolm bid for that to come to Edinburgh. In the end though, it went to @ESO in Garching.
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1997 pic: ESO
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1997 pic: ESO
My PhD was on the first-ever facility infrared camera for astronomy, IRCAM for UKIRT in Hawai'i, under the leadership of my PhD adviser, Ian McLean. In 1988, I took up a postdoc at @NASAGoddard, where HST had been assembled & its mission control was located.
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Pic: Bill Hrybyk
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Pic: Bill Hrybyk
I was working with Dan Gezari on mid-IR detectors originally made for SIRTF, later @NASAspitzer. HST folk were also around, as were COBE people, including John Mather, later to win the Nobel prize for COBE's work on the cosmic microwave background.
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Pic: John Mather
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Pic: John Mather
During my time at Goddard, I took part in some tests on a tool that astronauts were supposed to use to deploy the @esa-supplied HST solar arrays, if the main mechanism failed. This involved using space gloves in a vacuum cabinet, holding & activating the tool.
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The tool had a motor that was supposed to turn a certain number of times to fully deploy the arrays. We soon found that it was hard to grip with the stiff space gloves & if you let go, the motor counter reset to zero, losing count. Not a good design: that was fixed 
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At the end of my Goddard postdoc in 1989, I had a job offer to go to Australia to help build a new ground-based IR camera, but was also offered a position at @uarizona @azstewobs to work on a second-generation HST instrument for the IR called NICMOS.
Pic: Tom Fleming
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Pic: Tom Fleming
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The NICMOS project was led by Rodger Thompson, with Marcia Rieke as co-PI, & the team of astronomers & engineers was built-up prior to HST launch in April 1990. A @uhmanoa team had also bid for the HST IR project, & some of their team were folded into the NICMOS one.
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The Hawai'i team helped test the new 256x256 pixel NICMOS3 IR arrays for the instrument & put them on their telescopes. With my ex-Edinburgh fellow PhD student John Rayner in Hawai'i, we used the instruments for science, imaging star-forming regions like this, NGC7538.
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Soon after Hubble's launch in April 1990, its main mirror was found to show spherical aberration due to a polishing error, yielding images with sharp cores surrounded by fuzzy haloes. It was borderline catastrophic for NASA & astronomy.
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And the impact was quickly felt by the NICMOS project, as money was taken back to help develop the COSTAR optical correction system, to be installed in a future shuttle flight & compensate for the spherical aberration.
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Several people were let go from NICMOS on a very short timescale: I got just six weeks notice. Others had it worse; there was a tragedy a year later & I've always wondered whether this was linked to this unfortunate situation.
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I stayed in Arizona for almost a year longer, supported by research grants from Charlie Lada & Roger Angel. I worked with Roger on new IR detectors & his mirror lab, including the spin casting of the 6.5m mirror for the MMT on Mount Hopkins in March-April 1992.
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In September 1992, I moved to Heidelberg to work in Steve Beckwith's new IR group at @mpi_astro. Steve later became the Director at @stsci, leading the team that made the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, as dissected in a new 3D visualisation.
16/ https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52391627
16/ https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52391627
At that time, I was collaborating with Charles Prosser, John Stauffer et al on some of the first Hubble images made of the Orion Nebula & Trapezium Cluster to look for low-mass young stars. We had data before & after spherical aberration were fixed.
17/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994ApJ...421..517P/abstract
17/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994ApJ...421..517P/abstract
We were also visited in Heidelberg in summer 1994 by Bob O'Dell, who had been the Hubble project scientist at @NASA_Marshall from 1972-1982, & who had guaranteed observing time on the telescope as a result.
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Pic: NASA/ESA
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Pic: NASA/ESA
Bob showed me some new HST images of the Orion he had, including some dark shadows against the nebula. We checked some of my ground-based IR images of the region & we saw one of them there too. This led to us collaborating on the Hubble data.
19/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1996AJ....111.1977M/abstract
19/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1996AJ....111.1977M/abstract
What we'd seen were disks of gas & dust surrounding young stars in Orion, the likely site of ongoing planet formation. They were the first ever clear, unambiguous images of circumstellar disks ever taken.
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https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/1995/news-1995-45.html
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https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/1995/news-1995-45.html
Bob christened these objects "proplyds" for protoplanetary disks, although I have to admit that I never really liked the name, as it's interpretative, not just descriptive. They might form planets, but we don't know.
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Indeed, we'd been approached to publish our results in @nature, but were pushed to give a lower limit to the mass, to demonstrate that they were massive enough to form a solar system. We couldn't do that based on the data we had, so chose to publish in Astronomical Journal.
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We continued to collaborate on HST imaging of Orion, working with John Bally to discover more pure silhouette disks & other surrounded by envelopes of gas streaming away from the disk after being ionised by the massive stars in Orion.
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https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2000AJ....119.2919B/abstract
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https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2000AJ....119.2919B/abstract
Based on this work, I made two successful Hubble proposals to use NICMOS when it was launched & installed on the telescope during the second servicing mission STS-82 in 1997. By this time I had moved to @AIP_Potsdam & also got @DLR_de funding as a result.
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Pic: AIP/ R. Arlt
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Pic: AIP/ R. Arlt
Shortly beforehand, however, I had been working with Karl Menten at the MPI for Radioastronomy in Bonn, & Bob Fosbury had given a colloquium. Bob was one of the @esa staff working at the European Coordinating Facility for Hubble at @eso in Garching.
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Pic: NASA/ESA
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Pic: NASA/ESA
Bob told me that @esa was putting together a science team to support European involvement in what was then called the Next Generation Space Telescope or NGST, a proposed very large, IR-optimised NASA/ESA/CSA successor to Hubble. I applied & became a member of that team.
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The @esa Project Scientist for NGST, which later became #JWST, was Peter Jakobsen: he had previously been @esa's Project Scientist for Hubble based at ESTEC in The Netherlands.
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Peter led the team that successfully proposed for @esa to become a formal partner in NGST, & I later became a member of the JWST Science Working Group, as I am to this day. That has involved many, many meetings at @stsci, as they will operate JWST as well as HST.
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For HST, @esa supplied the Faint Object Camera, two generations of original solar arrays, scientists @stsci, & the ST-ECF in Garching. European scientists have been successful in winning 22% of the observing on Hubble on average, well above the nominal 15% ESA deal.
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For #JWST, Europe has supplied to NIRSpec spectrometer, with multi-shutter arrays & detectors from NASA, the MIRI camera/spectrometer with detectors again from NASA, scientists at @stsci again, & of course, a ride to space on an @arianespace #Ariane5.
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It seems likely that European scientists will again do very well in winning time on JWST, not least because of the major growth in complementary @esa space science missions & European leadership in ground-based astronomy through @eso since the early days of Hubble.
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Indeed, there are connections everywhere, as Riccardo Giacconi, one of the fathers of X-ray astronomy was later Director of both @stsci & @eso, and John Mather of COBE is now the senior project scientist for #JWST.
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And returning to Edinburgh, many people there in the 80s are now closely involved in #JWST, incl Gillian Wright, Director @ukatc & European PI of MIRI, Matt Mountain, ex-Director @stsci & now president of AURA, & myself & Simon Lilly as JWST SWG Interdisciplinary Scientists.
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My involvement in NGST/JWST led to me being a member of @esa's Astronomy Working Group & Space Science Advisory Committee, before joining the Agency in 2009 as Head of the Research & Scientific Support Department, making me Peter Jakobsen's boss' boss, which was strange 
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And as a member of the Science Working Group, I have guaranteed #JWST observing time, some of which I'll use in Cycle 1 to look at low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, & planetary mass objects in Orion, as well as the silhouette disks, linking back to that HST work.
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I'll also be observing protostellar jets & outflows, including HH211 & HH212, which John Rayner, Hans Zinnecker & I discovered through infrared imaging in the mid-1990s. These are more recent images from the VLT, but the JWST images will show much more detail & motion.
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HH212 has yet another Hubble connection: we observed it with NICMOS in 1998, but unfortunately it was too faint for that "small" telescope 
And I've written papers about the protostar that drives it with Jennifer Wiseman, NASA's Senior Project Scientist for Hubble today.
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And I've written papers about the protostar that drives it with Jennifer Wiseman, NASA's Senior Project Scientist for Hubble today.37/
There's more to be said, but I'll close this thread now.
One thing's certain: Hubble has played a major role in my career & personal life, even though I've never been a "super-user". Some of it was fantastic, some not, but I wouldn't be who I am or where I am without it.
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One thing's certain: Hubble has played a major role in my career & personal life, even though I've never been a "super-user". Some of it was fantastic, some not, but I wouldn't be who I am or where I am without it.
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And that's something that's true for hundreds, even thousands of astronomers & others in various ways, before we even get on to the many scientific discoveries & huge public impact.
Its influence simply cannot be overstated.
Happy 30th birthday, Hubble, & thank you.
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Its influence simply cannot be overstated.
Happy 30th birthday, Hubble, & thank you.
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