Tale of Two Telescopes: Science Operations. Hubble Space Telescope, WFIRST.
I'm a doctor Kenneth carpenter I'm an astrophysicist, I work my research area
is looking at stars that are both cooler and more evolved than the Sun.
My name is Mark postman I am a distinguished astronomer at the Space
Telescope Science Institute, where I'm currently the chair of the science staff at STScI.
When I first began, I worked as a postdoctoral research assistant on
one of the original Hubble instruments team. So one of the instruments that was
built before launch and was on Hubble when it first launched I joined that in
the mid 1980s so it's been 36 years since I did that.
So I joined Space Telescope Science Institute in the summer of 1989, so that's a little over
30 years ago. It was when I came on to the staff at STScI was about eight
months prior to the launch of Hubble Space Telescope.
And on WFIRST if you count all of the preliminary -- the preceding mission concepts to WFIRST
it's been about 12 years. I have been working on WFIRST in various forms
since about the year 2012. One of my roles as head of the community missions
office was to help the Institute get a key role in the operations of WFIRST.
The aspect of Hubble operations that it made it very unique and has led to the
tremendous success of the mission is that it was designed for servicing
designed to be serviced by astronauts using the Space Shuttle about every 3 to
5 years that meant we could both maintain the mission as things broke but
we could also upgrade the science instruments each time that that is the
secret to how we kept the Hubble mission on the leading edge of science as
America's, as the world's premier Observatory in space.
The main difference between and WFIRST is that Hubble has a very
narrow field of view, it provides great clarity wherever it looks but any-- the
size of the patch of sky Hubble can see at any one time is pretty small, in fact
in the 30 years that Hubble has been in operation even though it's made almost a
million observations and it's looked at many different parts of the sky, it's
actually only imaged about 0.1 percent of the entire sky. WFIRST, by contrast, has about
a hundred times the field of view of Hubble and has the same clarity that
Hubble has when it looks at a part of the universe so it's really gonna change
our capability in terms of our ability to map out a very crystal clear quality
what we see when we look at the sky. And WFIRST instead of about 45 square
degrees that Hubble has looked at over 30 years in about five years WFIRST is
going to look at well over 2,000 square degrees of sky and so it's gonna be a
real revolution in our ability to study the distant universe dark matter and
dark energy. I think Hubble has really taught us the
importance of really good public outreach. More than once the public has come
to the rescue of Hubble, either in getting servicing missions signed or
extending it its operations and that's because people feel invested in Hubble,
they feel involved in it because we've out over the years we've reached out to
them we've made them feel involved we've given them access to the beautiful
pictures because it's not just doing wonderful science which is great and
should be a justification all by itself, but it you know, it means something to me
as as a member of the public, I see this stuff and am like wow that is gorgeous
you let me get that image and put it up on my desktop or you know
blow it up and put it up on my wall and I think you know that kind of connection
that people is very very important so I'd like to make sure that we do that
for WFIRSTas well as we've done it for Hubble over the years.
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