Ed Weiler, NASA’s chief of space science, has gotten used to wearing lapel pins. Commemorative pins are a ubiquitous part of the space agency’s culture-contractors hand out these mementos like cigars before every launch, and multiyear missions earn serial souvenirs.
After 25 years, Weiler has many more pins than he has lapels. So he divides the real estate this way: left lapel available for the mission pin of the moment, right lapel sacrosanct, reserved for his Hubble Space Telescope pin, a rare silver one, given out almost two decades ago, before the Hubble was even named Hubble. At the time it was simply the most complicated telescope ever designed, not the most important one. But all that has changed.
“I’ll never take off my Hubble pin,” he says. “I’ve never been to a launch without it.”
| Weiler is a big part of why the Hubble is alive and well today. A spectroscopist by training, he served as the Hubble’s chief scientist from 1979 until 1998. During the 1980s, when the program was plagued by technical challenges, delays, and cost increases, he defended the imperiled concept that the scientific instruments on board should be regularly upgraded and replaced. The memo he wrote in 1983, proposing that NASA build a backup wide-field/planetary camera, proved prescient in 1990, when it was discovered that the telescope had been launched with a flaw in its primary mirror. In 1993 astronauts brought the backup camera with corrective optics to the telescope and installed them in a legendary feat of spacefaring. The fixes worked. |
Photograph by Amanda Friedman |
A shiny aluminum cylinder about the size of a school bus, flanked on either side by solar-power arrays that look like rectangular elephant ears, the Hubble is now sailing toward completion of its 14th year in orbit. Despite its housekeeping chores, such as the time-consuming business of pointing itself at new targets, called slewing, and repointing itself every 45 minutes or so when Earth and other bodies block the field of view, the Hubble manages to do science nearly 50 percent of the time-making it one of the most efficient telescopes ever to operate.
Its yield has been extraordinary. As of December 31, 2002, data and images hoovered by the Hubble had given rise to 3,577 papers in refereed journals. According to Bruce Margon, the associate director for science at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which oversees Hubble operations, 8 percent of all papers published in the top five astronomy journals in 2002 were based on Hubble results-more than twice as many as any ground-based telescope. “I find that almost dizzying,” Margon says. “No NASA program has ever generated this many papers or become more productive every year.”
One reason is that the Hubble is one of the most collaborative scientific enterprises ever. Ground-based telescopes often follow up on Hubble’s sightings, as does the Chandra X-ray Observatory, along with other orbiting telescopes. And the Hubble’s ability to observe in parts of the infrared and ultraviolet as well as in the visible spectrum has tended to break down long-standing walls between astronomical disciplines. “We’re no longer optical astronomers or X-ray astronomers or gamma-ray astronomers,” says John Bahcall, a professor of natural sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and a key member of the group that helped plan the telescope in the 1970s. “Now we’re all just astronomers. Everybody realizes you have to use all the wavelengths and all the tools to answer the big questions. Hubble has changed the way we practice astronomy.”
