HubbleThe Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most productive scientific instruments ever constructed. It is a relatively small telescope by terrestrial standards, housed in a cylinder just 4.2 meters wide and 14.3 meters long orbiting 550 kilometers above the earth at 28,000 kilometers per hour. The primary mirror, just 2.4 meters in diameter, polished to within 10 nanometers of perfection, is the most accurate surface ever made.

Since it was launched 25 years ago, on April 24, 1990, Hubble has provided more than one million observations encoded in more than 200 terabytes of data that have resulted in more than 15,000 scientific publications. These observations have revealed a wide variety of previously unsuspected aspects of the cosmos, and these have fundamentally altered our understanding of the universe.

Getting Hubble funded, built and launched required “speculative visions, brilliant insights, years of grinding work, triumphs and mistakes” as the historian William Smith put it. And realizing its promise once it was aloft required the dedication, ingenuity, and courage to carry out four servicing missions, including two rescue missions and several major upgrades, tasks greatly complicated by two space shuttle disasters.

The program consists of six presentations followed by a Q&A period. Two of the presentations will describe Hubble history. Three will discuss Hubble-based contributions to science in the areas of planets and stars, deep field observations and cosmology. And the final presentation will describe post-Hubble space observatories, including the James Webb Telescope and observatories that may come after the JWST.

Speakers

Getting to Orbit
Robert SmithProfessor, University of Alberta, Author of The Space Telescope: A Study of NASA, Science, Technology and Politics

Servicing Hubble
John GrunsfeldNASA Associate Administrator for the Science Directorate Astronaut on 3 Hubble Servicing Missions

Planets, Stars and Exoplanets
Jennifer J. WisemanSenior Project Scientist, Hubble Space Telescope

Deep Fields
Robert WilliamsSenior Research Astronomer, Space Telescope Science Institute, 1993-1998 – Director, STSI

Cosmology
Matt MountainPresident, Ass’n of Universities for Research in Astronomy
2005-2015 – Director, STSI

The James Webb Space Telescope & Beyond
Mark ClampinSenior Scientist, JWST

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