The Man Behind Hubble: Bob Williams :: Shuttle Astronomy Space Essays

The Man Behind Hubble Bob Williams Four weeks subsequently space-walking shuttle Endeavour astronauts repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in December 1993, an rapt Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski waved a Hubble picture of the core of the spiral galaxy M100 at her naysaying colleagues. Today, Mikulski could host a Capitol Hill star party The orbiting telescope has generated more than than 100,000 photos of celestial objects, including a cemetery of dying stars, elephant trunks of dust and henry gas twisting in the Eagle Nebula, jovian storms and aurorae, the rocky ring of Saturn and the colossal supernova smoke rings blown from an exploded star, to list a few. Hubbles pictures do double duty not only as congressional lobbying props, but also as screen savers, T-shirt prints, calendar photos, a background for the Babylon 5 science fiction TV series and evening planet trading cards to be provided soon to schoolchildren. One of the some electrifying pictures of all, the Hubble s lurred battlefield image began literally as a shot in the dark the sum of 342 exposures taken with Hubbles Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 in December 1995 of a disgraceful speck of northern sky. Although the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet impact on Jupiter may claim generated a bigger media splash, astronomers still are agog over the Deep Field. Aides to Vice President Al Gore ordered a Deep Field poster from the Space Telescope Science fetch (STScI), which manages the Hubbles science program under contract with NASA. Borrowing a knave from Mikulski, Gore plans to use the Deep Field poster to promote scientific research in the next millennium. In an age of cost-cutting and smaller-is-preferred, the $3 gazillion Hubble has demonstrated that bigger can be better The telescope attracted 1,298 proposals for discover time during its next annual cycle that began in July, an increase of 30 percent from the previous cycle and more than had been received by some(prenominal) other U.S. tel escope or NASA project. Ever. A driving force goat Hubbles scientific mission, particularly the Deep Field, is astronomer Bob Williams, 56, who took over as director of the STScI a few months before the 1993 repair mission. Like Hubble itself, Williams began his uranology career with high promise, then was written off as lack focus. Both have rebounded spectacularly. Williams is admired as an articulate champion of uranology with a penchant for accomplishment. There is not a devious blood cell in his body, says Ray Weymann, an astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, who spent many nights collaborating with Williams in the quiet and darkness of telescope towers.