The people's telescope
Thirty years ago this month, the Hubble Space Telescope entered orbit. Sold as a revolutionary tool that would look seven times farther into the universe than humanity had seen, scientists – and the public – were crushed when the first images beamed back were blurry. The telescope’s primary mirror was too shallow by 2 microns – a fraction of the width of a human hair.
A shuttle mission in 1993 installed corrective instruments, “and ever since then it’s been non-stop, discovery after discovery,” says James Jeletic, Hubble’s deputy project manager.
It’s no exaggeration to say Hubble has been a game-changer for astronomy, answering big questions (black holes, star and planet formation, the age of the universe) and raising others (dark energy). Today the telescope is doing what its creators never imagined, peering into the atmospheres of exoplanets and finding new, icy bodies at the edge of our solar system.
“We’re creating more papers with the archived data than with new data coming in because we have so much of it,” Jeletic says. “Even better, Hubble still has redundancy in all its critical systems, so we believe we can keep it making groundbreaking scientific discoveries into the late 2020s and beyond.”
Pretty good for a telescope that was projected to last 15 years. Thanks to the dedication of the Hubble mission operations team at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. – which includes over a dozen veterans – the legendary telescope is at the peak of its powers.
DAVE SCHAIBLE, ground systems engineer
Hubble’s software platforms are updated all the time, and as a tester, Dave Schaible identifies problems for developers to fix. He’s also one of eight people who sends commands to the telescope.
When he retired from the Army in 2004, Schaible was working as a satellite controller, so for him, communicating with NASA’s premier observatory is just another day at the office. “When I first trained others here, their hands would shake while they were trying to type, and it’s like, ‘Relax, breathe.’ I just had a different background coming in.”
Schaible grew up during the space race, watching the moon landing and, later, Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.” He’s proud every time a new Hubble discovery is announced, though it’s as much a surprise to him as it is to the public. “When it passes through here,” he says, “it’s just zeros and ones.”
Operating with vintage computing systems, Hubble has a unique language. But it’s still the biggest name in satellites, producing data that scientists will be examining for decades, Schaible says.
“Hubble launched with 64 kilobytes of memory. Now we’ve got 2 megabytes up there. Forget that my phone has 64 gigabytes! But Hubble does a lot with very little, which is great.”
JERRY EDWARDS, flight controller/mission engineer
Though Hubble’s operations went automated in 2011, Jerry Edwards and his colleagues send up commands when necessary. Often that’s uploading a new ephemeris – letting the vehicle know where it’s at in space so it can orient itself correctly – or a program from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, which guides Hubble’s science operations.
When the telescope is having difficulty acquiring stars or needs attention, Edwards hears about it. “It’s an inanimate object I can’t touch, but it’s a vital piece of my life,” he says. “It sends me pages at night when I’m the on-call guy.”
A retired master sergeant, Edwards began his Air Force career as a radio operator and ended it flying satellites. He’s worked for Hubble since 2005 and appreciates how the project “takes all that science and puts it in a form anybody can appreciate.”
For 30 years, the telescope has given taxpayers the most bang for their buck, he says. But with every orbit, it’s dropping ever so slightly. The Hubble team remains optimistic, predicting at least another decade of life.
When the end does come, “it’s going to be hard walking away,” says Edwards, a member of Harford American Legion Post 39 in Bel Air, Md. “But the James Webb Space Telescope is coming around, and another one called WFIRST. They’re going to carry on Hubble’s legacy.”
DOUG GRIMES, flight controller/mission engineer
At any time, Hubble is sending out 7,000 pieces of telemetry – temperature, pressure, all kinds of numbers. As mission engineer, Doug Grimes reviews it all, including the science data before it goes to the Space Telescope Science Institute.
“I make sure there aren’t any problems with it,” he says. “Sometimes it may require a program to fix it or for Hubble to dump a piece of data again. It’s all about the science.”
Grimes is a former Marine Corps reservist and a second-generation NASA employee. His father, David, was a project manager for the Delta rocket. “He loved his job. We’d go to the beach and he’d be down the street on a payphone talking to work. So it’s in my blood.”
In his 20 years with Hubble, Grimes’ favorite moments include meeting the astronauts who touched the telescope in orbit. Just prior to the fourth servicing mission in 2002, he was in the control center when two of them came in and said, “Hey, we want to sit in the chair of the guy who commands the Hubble Space Telescope.”
“Those guys are larger than life,” he says. “That just made my day.”
From Grimes’ perspective, Hubble is the greatest of NASA’s observatories. “I can’t imagine they envisioned it’d be up there 30 years, but here we are with another 10, 15 years left. It’s changed how we think of ourselves and where we fit in the universe.”
DAN SMITH, systems engineering manager
A Navy and Air National Guard veteran, Dan Smith has been at the Hubble project since 1996, just before the second servicing mission. As systems engineering manager, he assesses the vehicle’s health and safety with a team of 15 or so engineers and specialists he can call in. “When something breaks, we find work-arounds,” he says.
Prior to Hubble, Smith worked at Johnson Space Center in Houston – specifically, mission operations for the shuttle program, payloads branch. One of those payloads was Hubble, so when a job opened up at Goddard, he was already familiar with the telescope.
“It’s a tremendous engineering challenge, but it was built like a Cadillac,” he says. “Some of our hardware is launch hardware that was sitting on a shelf since the mid-’80s. It’s working like a charm, most of it. We’ll get some key components that are troublesome, but for the most part, it’s a wonderful platform. Very well designed.”
With only a few years until his retirement, Smith expects Hubble to outlast him. The telescope is on its last three gyroscopes, one of which has been going strong since the last servicing mission in 2009. “It’s been running for 11-plus years now,” he says. “That’s a lot of run time. We’re hoping to get the same performance out of the other two gyros. We should be able to make the year 2030.”
DAVID “CHIP” FORWARD, property and logistics manager
Military logistics and transportation experience brought Chip Forward to Hubble in 1999. “It’s a small career field, like brain surgeons,” he says, grinning. “Not a lot of people do this for a living.”
An Air Force veteran, he’s responsible for the inventory of approximately 1,200 pieces of equipment, from computer monitors and copiers to the gloves and tools astronauts used to service Hubble in orbit. In the run-up to those missions, he also coordinated the specialized trucks, carriers and airlifts necessary to move people and parts between Goddard and other sites – “a lot of project support,” says Forward, a member of Liberty American Legion Post 122 in Owings Mills, Md.
When he catches himself taking his job for granted, Forward thinks of the bigger picture – specifically, Hubble’s famous Deep Field picture. Taken over 10 days in 1995, the image covers a seemingly empty area about one 24-millionth of the sky, or the size of a grain of rice at arm’s length.
“Pull it up online, and when you zoom in, you’ll see thousands of galaxies in what we thought was a dark spot,” he says. “Every one of them is like the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is huge. And we’re just one solar system. The mathematics is mind-blowing.”
CLIFF TIMPSON, senior cyber IT security engineer
Cliff Timpson is Hubble’s senior information security systems officer, responsible for protecting the telescope’s cyber infrastructure. An Army veteran, he deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait before going to work for the FBI. When he joined Hubble in 2017, Timpson had a degree in applied sciences and, thanks to the Post-9/11 GI Bill, one in information systems management. He’s at work on a third, in cybersecurity policy and management. None of it is wasted at Hubble.
“One of the biggest challenges is the legacy software and equipment,” Timpson says. “You have to interface it with newer technology. If we need to update a piece of Hubble, we meet and get an idea of what needs done. We map it out. We test it. Then we get approval from senior management. It’s never, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do this within a week.’ It usually takes a year to get a major infrastructure change approved and completed.”
One of the Hubble team’s youngest members, Timpson was 8 when the telescope launched, and grew up in a world shaped by its advancements. Smaller and faster computer chips, clearer mammograms, image enhancement to help decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, data-processing software used in mapping the human genome – Hubble made possible all these and more. “It’s a national treasure,” he says.