West Seattle High School alum’s shuttle mission: Days away

johnson-gc-thumbnail.jpgJust got a news release from the University of Washington that reminds us, the space shuttle mission piloted by West Seattle High School Class of ’72 alum Gregory Johnson (here’s our August story) is scheduled to finally lift off next week (11 am our time Monday, per nasa.gov), if all goes as planned between now and then. The UW news release notes that Johnson graduated after studying engineering there, and that’s not the only UW link – read on!

When the space shuttle Atlantis blasts off from Cape Canaveral,
Fla., on May 11, the University of Washington will be front and center in
the final mission to service and repair the Hubble Space Telescope.

Atlantis will be piloted by UW engineering graduate Gregory C.
Johnson and will carry a new Hubble camera that a team of scientists that
includes Bruce Balick, a UW astronomy professor, has been working on for 10
years.

Johnson will carry a banner for the UW’s aeronautics and
astronautics department. He was born in Seattle, attended West Seattle High
School and graduated from the UW in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in
aeronautical and astronautical engineering.

Adam Bruckner, chair of the UW aeronautics and astronautics
department, remembers Johnson as a bright, attentive student who sat in the
front row during the laboratory classes he taught in 1976. Johnson is one of
15 NASA astronauts who have ties to the university.

UW astronomers also helped develop one of two new instruments to
be delivered during this mission. The Wide Field Camera 3 will replace the
Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which was installed on Hubble during a
servicing mission in 1994. That camera, which has produced most of the
stirring images most associated with the orbiting telescope, replaced the
original wide field camera that was on Hubble when it was launched in April
1990.

Balick, a former UW astronomy chairman, is a member of the
Scientific Oversight Committee designed to represent the entire
international astronomy community in defining the mission for the new camera
and make sure it operates effectively, as well as making design and budget
decisions. Hubble has played a major role in his research since 1995.

The new camera used many of the parts of the first camera,
Balick said, but its capabilities will be far greater than either of its
predecessors. Those cameras could only record observations in red and green
wavelengths, but the new camera has been designed to work effectively in the
infrared, blue, violet and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum as well. He
expects the new images to provide even greater detail of how the universe
works.

Hubble’s famed images are 100 times sharper than those from
telescopes on the ground, though because of its magnification it can only
observe a patch of sky the size of 1 percent of a full moon. It also can
observe the universe in wavelengths such as ultraviolet that do not
penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere.

“We can see the haystacks from the ground. We need a telescope
like Hubble to study the needles,” Balick said. “That’s where the research
frontiers of astronomy are, especially for studies of tiny galaxies at the
edge of the visible universe.”

The new camera will make it possible to study the formation of
hot massive stars that explode as supernovae at the end of their lives, and
to explore how such stars evolve and interact with the clouds of dust and
gas that they form. The new camera can probe the earliest stages of star and
planet formation, and is the only way for scientists to find out how stars
like ours form, evolve and die.

Similarly, astronomers will be able to use the new camera’s
infrared capabilities to study how galaxies form and to examine the most
remote parts of the universe, which send light to us from the very first
generation of stars that formed after the big bang.

“In other words, we can peer into our earliest history, at least
in a statistical sense. I’d like to see a historian or a geologist try
that,” Balick said.

“We defined a number of key astronomical questions that we want
answered, and we designed the camera to answer them. But when the history
books are written I know the value of the camera will be something different
from what we expected,” Balick said.

In his own work, he hopes to use the camera to study how aging
stars blow off their outer layers before they die. As that happens, they
inject carbon into the gas and dust that fills the void between stars in a
galaxy, and the carbon can lead to the formation of life.

Hubble, a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and
the Space Telescope Science Institute, can lay claim to both scientific
achievement and public acclaim. During the final servicing mission,
astronauts will make five spacewalks to install two new instruments, repair
two inactive ones, and replace equipment such as batteries and gyroscopes to
keep the telescope operational at least into 2014. When it is no longer
functional, Hubble will be sent into the Pacific Ocean.

Previous service trips during the Hubble’s 19-year operation
took place in 1993, 1997, 1999 and 2002. This will be the fifth and final
mission to the Hubble.

“No matter how you measure it, the Hubble is the biggest bang for the buck
any space mission has given to date,” Bruckner said. “The amount of
information it has recorded and the number of discoveries it has generated
are incomparable.”

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