Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Celebrating 30 Years of Hubble with Astronaut John Grunsfeld

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

Former astronaut and NASA Associate Administrator John Grunsfeld is often called the Hubble Repairman. He made three space shuttle trips to the space telescope to repair and upgrade it. Now he looks back over three decades of science, beautiful images, and inspiration delivered by the HST. Rubber asteroids are back, and you might win one in the new What’s Up space trivia contest. Great links, including to Mat Kaplan’s live interview with John Grunsfeld, are at https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2020/0527-2020-john-grunsfeld-hubble-30th.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The astronaut known as the Hubble Repairman marks the telescope's 30th anniversary this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. The Hubble Space Telescope has just completed three decades in space. Its accomplishments have far exceeded even its most optimistic creators. Hubble Space Telescope has just completed three decades in space. Its accomplishments have far exceeded even its most optimistic creators. One of those accomplishments is how the beauty and wonder it has revealed have thrilled and inspired hundreds of millions of Earthlings. We'll review its life so far with the man who visited it three times, the astronaut

who would later become NASA's chief scientist and who is still using the Hubble in his research today. For all of its successes, the Hubble has yet to find the fabled rubber asteroid, but we have one waiting for the winner of this week's What's Up Space Trivia contest, along with a great new book. This week's biggest space story is in last Friday's edition of The Downlink. As I record this, we are still a few hours away from the launch of a SpaceX Crew Dragon on Demonstration Mission 2, the mission that will take Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International

Space Station. Like most of you, all of us at the Planetary Society will be watching and holding our breath as the Falcon 9 rocket sends them soaring. The WFIRST telescope is no more. No, not canceled, but renamed the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Roman passed away in 2018. She led an effort back in the 1960s to envision how telescopes in space could advance research. The naming would appear to be a good sign for the troubled project. The Trump administration has tried to cancel it in each of the last three years.

We've got more information at planetary.org slash roman hyphen space hyphen telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope is the more immediate follow-on to the Hubble. The JWST's giant multi-segmented mirror has been folded up into the configuration that will allow it to fit inside the payload nose cone of the rocket that will finally, we hope, carry it into space next year. it into space next year. And we now know that OSIRIS-REx will make its first attempt to collect a surface sample from asteroid Bennu on the 20th of October this year. The spacecraft and its samples will return to Earth in 2023. There's much more to enjoy in the downlink. This and every week you'll find it at planetary.org slash downlink, and a subscription is free. I've now hosted three live online events for Explore Mars, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that shares the Planetary Society's goals for the Red Planet.

You may have heard my delicious conversation with astrobiologist Penny Boston and NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green. I'm back this week with audio excerpts from the third of these events, and it features a former NASA Chief Scientist. The audio quality is, once again, not quite up to our usual standard, but I think you'll enjoy my recent long conversation with John Grunsfeld. You'll hear John refer to some slides he presented. I've kept these references because I think they work just fine in this format. You can watch the video of the complete event at exploremars.org. Here's Explore Mars CEO Chris Carberry getting the show underway.

I'd like to introduce our panel, Matt Kaplan and John Grunsfeld. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you, Chris, very much. It's likely that there isn't another man or woman who knows more about the Hubble Space Telescope than John Grunsfeld. It is certainly true that no one has done in space more with this most famous scientific instrument of all time. He is an astrophysicist who has taught and conducted research for some of the finest institutions on our planet. He flew on five, count them, five shuttle missions. Three of these were dedicated to maintenance and upgrade of the Hubble, or HST. He spent more than 58 hours outside in extravehicular activity.

Later, he would become NASA's chief scientist and then the agency's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. This meant that he had responsibility for well over $5 billion worth of missions, projects, and research. He finally retired from NASA four years ago. That was also when I met John. It was at the annual Space Symposium in Colorado where we compared space ties. John, I know that you have some great slides that you want to share with us. I want to confirm something first. Is it true that you were the last person to touch the Hubble?

Well, that's a matter of great debate because, of course, I was wearing gloves. And I'm a human space like I am wearing gloves today, as a matter of fact. And so apparently that's my normal attire. I'm not wearing a tie today. So you went on the tie department. But Megan MacArthur claims to be the last one to touch the Hubble because her job on board was robotic arm operator. So she touched everything with the shuttle robotic arm. And of course, we did have to deploy the Hubble. But it is true that, you know, as far as human hands, at least in gloves, I was the last person to touch the Hubble. Well, whether it was through thick pressurized gloves or not, I think you have described yourself as a telescope hugger. I am one of many Hubble huggers over the years.

And, you know, this year we're celebrating quite the milestone. This is the 30th year of Hubble being on orbit. It was launched in 1990, April 24th, 1990 was the launch of Hubble. So we're just slightly over 30 years. It's still a milestone. Very few observatories, very few satellites make it 30 years on orbit. And it's a testament to the incredible designers, the people who designed the Hubble Space Telescope and doing breakthrough science because we were able to go up and put new scientific instruments in and fix things that break. Otherwise, Hubble would no longer be viable now. So it's a pretty incredible story and optimal marriage of human spaceflight and science robotic spacecraft to be able to allow Hubble to unravel the mysteries of

the universe. So serviceable, designed to be serviceable, but not always in the most easy way, as I bet you will get to. If you don't in your slides, we will later, because sometimes it could be quite a challenge, as we've heard from you and others who completed that spectacular work on the Hubble Space Telescope and made sure that it is still able to do great science for us today. Why don't we go ahead into your slides, and then we'll follow that up with questions, more from me and some from our viewers. Chris Carberry, thank you very much for inviting me. Chris did try one of those repairs that Hubble was not designed to be repaired that we had to do.

And I think that's a very important thing to bring out right from the start is that what we've learned from repairing and upgrading the Hubble Space Telescope is just about anything that you can do on the ground, we can learn how to do in space. Maybe a little bit harder in the spacesuit, but people are really good tool builders and we figure out a way to do it. And when we go to Mars, we're going to have to really exercise that a lot because, you know, Mars exploration presents challenges that we cannot anticipate now. And the fact that we can do these difficult repairs on Hubble, I think, bodes very well for human exploration. I do want to, at Matt's urging though, mention that human exploration and the first American to orbit the earth was John Glenn. And he was just a tremendous guy.

He had two space flights, you know, one on Mercury that we're all very familiar with. And of course, at the age of 77, he flew on the space shuttle. And that mission actually carried some hardware that was a test flight for our Hubble mission in 2002. Fortunately, he lived a very long and productive life, both serving as an astronaut and serving as a public servant. But behind John Glenn, and I think responsible for, and John, I think, would agree with this completely, responsible for a significant fraction of his success in life was his wife, Annie. And Annie was just absolutely the most wonderful person you could ever imagine.

Stood up to John when she wanted to, and it was frequent. And he had just ultimate love and respect for Annie as a human being. And sadly, she passed away today at the age of 100 years, which is pretty incredible. Very, very strong woman. And I think we should all give her a salute here today. Thank you, John. Thank you for that tribute. We can only hope Hubble lives 100 years, but 30 isn't too bad. This is the 30th anniversary picture. One of the traditions of the Hubble Space Telescope is every year the Space Telescope Science Institute,

which manages the Hubble Science Program and operates the Hubble Telescope, produces an anniversary image. And this one's called Cosmic Reef. This kind of looks like, if you look actually down on Earth at coral reefs, you know, they have an amazing green-blue hue. This is a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. So in the Northern Hemisphere here, we don't get to see this.

We have any sky watchers from the Southern Hemisphere. This is a familiar object, but probably not in quite this glorious detail. And this is a stellar nursery, and it's being lit up by very hot stars that have just turned on, so to speak. It's just really a beautiful image. And I think this image and many other Hubble images highlights the value of the Hubble Space Telescope, which is amazing science. From images like this, we learn about star formation, about stellar evolution. We learn about how material goes from the inside of stars into clouds and then to reform into stars, the

life cycle of stars, how planetary systems form, because what we learned studying in detail is that when stars like this form, the stellar material circling that star forms at about the same time as, and planets form at about the same time. So incredibly scientifically rich, but it also shows something that before Hubble, we didn't really, I think, appreciate, which is that the universe is a more beautiful and dynamic place than we ever imagined. This could be a piece of modern art, you know, that would sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars at an auction. But yet, this is nature. And we see this all over the universe. And the Hubble has been the primary mechanism by which we have been able to show people around the world the wonder

and awe of the universe, the beauty and richness in the universe. 11 years ago, I was on orbit on the space shuttle with my crew, and one of the items we got to bring with us was a replica of Galileo's telescope. And it just shows that in know roughly 500 years how far humanity has come from somebody taking a telescope galile and observing the skies with it to the hubble space telescope and being able to build a space shuttle to go up to space to be able to service that hubble space telescope and how much we've learned i mean it's really incredible that just in the last 100 years, from Edwin Hubble observing on a 100-inch telescope to the Hubble Space Telescope, which is only about 94 inches across, that we've been able to put together a story of the origin of the universe, the Big Bang,

to the expansion of the universe, to the formation of galaxies, of black holes, of planetary systems, all the way through the formation and evolution of the Earth in just 100 years is pretty incredible, using observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope is not a particularly large telescope by astronomical standards. It's 2.4 meters across. It weighs about 25,000 pounds. But by being above the atmosphere, we get a clear view of the universe. The atmosphere makes things look fuzzy because the atmosphere is moving. As well, certain types of light, ultraviolet light, for instance, don't make it down to the surface of the Earth. And so we just can't see it. There

aren't ultraviolet telescopes on mountaintops because the ultraviolet light doesn't make it through our atmosphere. And so the Hubble's perch in orbit gives it an unfair advantage over big telescopes on the ground, but that's okay. They work together for us to learn about astronomy. You know, we use the word Hubble as a kind of superlative. So when we talk about the Hubble of particle accelerators or the Hubble of cars or things like that, you know, we mean, you know, the best thing possible. You know, using that word, though, we forget about Hubble's infancy when it first got to orbit. This is one of many cartoons that appeared early in Hubble's history and it says first photos from the Hubble and there's a picture of a

distorted moon, looks kind of like a peanut, Jupiter, Saturn and then if you were to turn the Hubble down on the ground you would see very angry taxpayers and that's because when Hubble was launched and they took the first images, astronomers realized that something was horribly wrong. And it was determined pretty quickly that the mirror had something called spherical aberration. And what that means is that the prescription of the mirror, think of wearing glasses, was slightly incorrect and the images were fuzzy. was slightly incorrect and the images were fuzzy. Fortunately, by interrogating the images, astronomers and optical engineers were able to figure out what that wrong prescription was and fix it. And so on the first service mission in 1993, the crew brought up contact lenses in effect.

In fact, they were mirrors, but that doesn't matter. The mirror corrected the spherical aberration. And ever since then, we think of Hubble as the greatest thing ever. So as I said, 11 years ago, I was on orbit with this crew. The crew is commanded by Scott Altman. It was his fourth mission. He's an aerospace engineer and a Navy captain. He had flown also with me in 2002 to the Hubble Space Telescope, so he was a Hubble veteran. To his right is Megan MacArthur. It was her first flight. She's an oceanographer and an astronaut, obviously, and she was our robotic arm operator and flight engineer. Of course, to her right is myself on my fifth mission, my third mission, the Hubble Space Telescope. My spacewalking partner, Drew Feustel, to her right is myself on my fifth mission, my third mission, the Hubble Space Telescope. My spacewalking partner, Drew Feustel, to my right, was on his first flight, and he's a geologist, an exploration geologist.

He's still active in the Astronaut Corps and returned last year from the International Space Station. To Scott Altman's left is Greg Johnson, an aeronautical engineer and also a Navy captain. And he is now at Blue Origin and he was our pilot. To his left is Mike Good, Air Force Colonel, flight test engineer on his first flight, also at Blue Origin now. And he was a space walking partner with somebody you probably

have heard of mike massimino as astro mike if you follow him on twitter and he was on his second flight he flew with me as well in 2002. so we had a mix of hubble experience and and first-time flyers but you wouldn't know it on orbit. Everybody did just really well getting to orbit, training, and fixing the Hubble. Much more of my live conversation with former astronaut, NASA Chief Scientist and Associate Administrator John Grunsfeld is only about a minute away. But we need to take that minute to talk one more time about the sponsor who's helped make it possible

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Greens for yourself. Simply visit athleticgreens.com slash planetary to claim my special offer of 20 free daily travel packs with your first purchase, a $79 added value. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash planetary. First, we had to launch. This was the first time I'd been on a day launch. My previous four missions had been night launches, so that was a different experience. But still, the ride to orbit is incredibly dynamic, really a pretty exciting thing to do. And we flew after the tragic

loss of Columbia. And by not going to the space station, we didn't have a rescue option to hang out at the space station. So there was actually a second shuttle on the other launch pad, just in case something happened, theoretically, they could come to rescue us. I think mostly it was to show that you know NASA was doing something just in case something went wrong rather than just ignoring the risk, but nevertheless we you know we had that sort of in the background. Of course once we got to orbit safely they turned that around to prepare it for the next station mission as we were you were safely on orbit. Once we got to orbit, we had to chase down the Hubble Space Telescope.

Next slide. And so here's Scott Altman actually manually flying the space shuttle up underneath the Hubble Space Telescope as we got closer and closer. And his job was to get us right next to the Hubble and with the shuttle basically motionless compared to the Hubble Space Telescope so that Megan MacArthur, next slide, could reach out with the robotic arm and grab the Hubble. I find really fascinating sociologically is when I trained on the robotic arm, we actually have a large hydraulic arm in Houston that I could drive around and practice with. And when Megan trained, we had switched everything to computer simulators, meaning basically she trained how to grab Hubble in a computer game, did it over and over again. So when we got to orbit, it was the first time she got to fly the robotic arm to grab the Hubble Space Telescope, you know, this, you know, what, pick your number,

$8 billion international resource exploring the universe, one of a kind. And if she bumped it accidentally instead of grabbing it, it would go floating off and we probably wouldn't be able to get it back, just from safety and power and other things. So she had a lot of focus and she did a great job. Successfully grabbed the Hubble Space Telescope and with that we put the Hubble into the payload bay of the shuttle. The next day we were ready to do our spacewalks and this is what I really love to get into a spacesuit and go outside. And I think you can see hopefully that I have a big smile on my face and anytime I'm outside in the spacesuit, and almost all the time in space, I have that that silly grin on my face because it is just so special. And here, if you look in my helmet,

you can see the Earth reflected in my visor. Behind me is the space shuttle wing. To the left is some of the gear that we bring up to service the Hubble Space Telescope. And the amazing spacesuit. The spacesuit is really a whole spaceship in itself. In the backpack, of course, there's oxygen. There's a backup oxygen supply. There's batteries. There's a little canister to absorb carbon dioxide as I exhale. Of course, my helmet. The helmet has cameras. People inside the shuttle and on the ground can see what we're looking at and working on. There's helmet lights with high and low beams.

And the batteries are so good now, we just leave those on all the time. In front of me is my tool belt. And everything on that tool belt has to have a tether. Because if a tool floats away, that'd be really bad. Not to mention that you wouldn't have the tool to fix something, but eventually that's going to reenter and you wouldn't want it to hit that high flying airplane we call the International Space Station. So we were trained if we let go of a tool to say, look out below. But fortunately, on none of my Hubble missions, we really trained this hard. We didn't lose a single tool or object.

One of the reasons I was so happy is on this first spacewalking day, our job was to change out the Wide Field Camera 2 that was put on in 1993 and replace it with the super duper Wide Field Camera 3. 3. And, you know, it sounds like one upgrade, but Wide Field Camera 3 incorporates, you know, the best detectors, the best cameras that were available in 2009, and in fact are still pretty much state-of-the-art. And it had two channels, a visual channel, like what we see, and an infrared channel. So really a major advance for Hubble, something that really promised to explore new realms. And one of the easiest tasks that we do on Hubble, I mean, there were two bolts, you loosen, you pull it out, you put the new camera in, you tighten the two bolts, and you're done. So I was pretty happy that we were heading out to go put in this new camera, revolutionize astronomy. And when Drew went to

loosen the bolt, he couldn't get it loose. It was too tight. And we really sweated that for a long time. And I was thinking, this is the one time I've been out spacewalking and I was not smiling. I thought, I cannot believe we came all this way. The Hubble project was canceled, that we got it back, that we survived launch, you know, we got to orbit, you know, and now we can't get the old camera out. Fortunately the ground gave us the go for Drew to apply a little elbow grease beyond what torque was normally allowed, and he was able to loosen the bolt. But it was tense for a little while.

We also replaced the optical correction device. I talked about contact lenses. COSTAR instrument, which is the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement. COSTAR is a much easier way to say it, that had those contact lenses. So it wasn't quite as simple. But we were able to remove that because all the new instruments have that correction incorporated into their own optics. have that correction incorporated into their own optics. And so we were able to take that out and put in a new instrument called the Cosmic Origin Spectrograph, which is up on orbit now working great. You can also see that Drew has a death ray laser on his side, his sidearm,

that thing with the long tube, as part of Space Force investigations early on. But actually that's a power tool that's basically a power screwdriver. It's something that Hubble Space Telescope Project pioneered. It's now widely used on the ground. It's called a line tool or wire tool, but that's our general purpose screwdriver wrench and it's used on basically every station spacewalk now and so Hubble has been a pioneer for space tools as well. The other thing you notice is that that box looks very big and it is and it weighs about 800 pounds so I convinced

Drew to go to the gym every day for a year to lift weights so he'd be able to lift that thing which is pretty silly because it's free-floating as is everything so it has no weight in space but in fact it does have mass not like mass amino but it has you know physical mass and you have to be very strong in the space suit to be able to handle big objects like that because one the space suit provides a lot of resistance just to do a bicep curl or something you know it's like lifting a 30 pound barbell if you get a big box like that moving too fast, you got to be strong enough to stop it or it'll slip right out of your

hands. One thing is move very slowly, but you have to be pretty strong. So spacewalking is actually very much an athletic event. We also put in a new flying guidance sensor. We changed the batteries on Hubble. We changed the gyroscopes. We changed some thermal insulation, all kinds of upgrades and repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope, such that when we left it in 2009, Hubble was not only state-of-the-art in terms of scientific instruments, with all of the instruments working, it was also upgraded so that it would have hopefully a very long lifetime. Now our warranty was five years, labor included, and that expired quite a long time ago, but I'm happy to say that everything on Hubble is working well and we still have a full complement

of working gyros. Knock on wood, you know, Hubble can last, you know, another five or ten years on orbit. So once we were done playing outside, Megan was able to grab the Hubble again, lift it out of the payload bay, everything working, everything fixed, and let go of it so that we could back out from underneath it with Scott Altman at the controls. And so we saw Hubble drifting off into the distance behind us, getting smaller and smaller until we couldn't see it anymore. And, you know, Hubble has been on its journey ever since. The question is, you know, did we fix the Hubble or did we break the Hubble? And this is just an example that says, you know, we fixed the Hubble.

And this is an image that's called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. And this is an image that's called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. You've probably seen a picture called the Deep Field, but the Ultra Deep Field is with this new camera. And other than, you know, a couple of stars that are in our own galaxy, and you can see those because they have the little crosses, diffraction patterns coming out from them. I see two stars in this image that are in our own galaxy. coming out from them. I see two stars in this image that are in our own galaxy. Everything else in this picture, every speck that you see is a whole galaxy with tens to hundreds of billions of stars. In the original deep field picture, Hubble could see about 3,000 galaxies. There were over 10,000 galaxies in this one picture. And this picture is smaller than your pinky, if you were to hold your pinky at arm's length up at the sky, your pinky nail. This picture is an

area of the sky smaller than that. And so it's really incredible when you think about here we are on planet Earth orbiting a rather ordinary small star, a very quiet star, in a solar system with eight plus one planets. That one star in our galaxy is one in 400 billion in our extended galaxy, and there are just billions and billions of other stars and galaxies out there. Think of how many other Earths are out there, and it's just mind-boggling. There must be many. A little closer to home, when I was growing up, one of my favorite constellations was the constellation Orion. If you look at Orion, it's easy to identify Orion's belt with three stars, and then there's a sword that are three stars.

But actually, that middle star on the sword is not a star at all. It's this star-forming region, a very bright region of gas and dust, where some of that gas and dust is collapsing and baby stars are being born. And this is what it looks like through the Hubble Space Telescope. And again, this looks like an amazing abstract art creation, maybe from an airbrush artist. But this is real nature. You know, this is what it would look like if you had the sensitivity of the Hubble Space Telescope and a little bit wider spectrum that our eyes could see. And we've been able to study this in great detail to look at stars that have just turned on

from collapsing gas and dust until it heats up enough that fusion starts. Of course, the Hubble doesn't just look at distant things, it also looks at close things. And this is a series of images that were taken by the Hubble, stacked on top of each other. And we have captured in each of those images, the moon of Mars Phobos, as it moves along in its orbit. But it also shows us that we think of most planets as being very different from Earth. But here we can see that there's high-level clouds on Mars. And it just reminds us that Mars has,

even though it's a thin atmosphere, has a carbon dioxide atmosphere that has a lot of other components, including trace amounts of oxygen and water vapor. These are not only carbon dioxide clouds, but water clouds. And we have actually seen snow on Mars from our Mars explorers. And you can see that there's different weather patterns. And of course, this is the southern hemisphere winter. We can't see the solar

ice cap at the South Pole in this image just because of the angle. But Mars is a dynamic planet with seasons and weather. Someplace I'd like to go, and I know lots of you on the viewing probably would like to go too. And Hubble has been able to study dust storms and weather and climate patterns on Mars now for 30 years, and we will continue to do so. What's up in the future? That's something we'd all like to know. And one of those things that's getting closer to launch, we're now, you know, about a year from launch is the James Webb Space Telescope. And it's going to be amazing observing Mars. That's going to be just really incredible, and the rest of the universe. I wanted to put in a plug for James Webb Space Telescope. I think all the, you know, the pieces have been put together and they're buttoning it up, getting ready to send it to the launch pad for launch on RAN 5 next year.

There are some interruptions due to COVID-19, but hopefully we get off next year and we can start absorbing soon thereafter. That's the Hubble story. The Hubble Space Telescope is still very much alive. The story is still evolving. And I like to say that perhaps the most incredible discovery from the Hubble Space Telescope hasn't been made yet and will be made in the future. So, Matt, over to you. but hours and hours going through thousands of iconic images. I mean, I've been in the office of a senator who had the deep field on his wall. Everybody knows the towers of the pillars of creation, right? It's endless. And it's, they're all gorgeous. It says something about, I think, not just the contributions that Hubble has made to science, but also to the public's appreciation of science. And I mean, the public around the world, not just in the United States. Did everyone realize how important Hubble, the contribution that it would make in that area as well, that it would become,

as I said, probably the most famous scientific instrument of all time? I don't want to make it sound like a cult, but Hubble really may well be, by almost any metric, the most productive scientific instrument humans have ever created to date. And again, I credit the amazing engineers who designed it, the ability of astronauts to go up and service it, that that longevity has allowed us to unravel the mysteries of the universe as much as it has. to unravel the mysteries of the universe as much as it has. I don't think it was well appreciated how Hubble would share that wonder and awe of the universe with the general public. And that's because before Hubble, we didn't really know how beautiful the universe is. We hadn't had that experience. The best images on the ground did show incredibly colorful, fuzzy objects. But it's when you have the resolution of the human eyeball, or better, on the universe that you start to go, wow, you know, that's really beautiful. to think about the universe we live in in a way that we never thought before.

I think most people before that thought, yeah, the universe is filled with stars, little points of light, and some planets. And the planets are interesting, but not the beauty that we see with the Hubble Space Telescope. With all of that work you did for NASA, I mean, you followed that with a stint at another organization that everybody knows, the Hubble, but they may not know one of the organizations behind it, the Space Telescope Science Institute, where you were deputy director. Could you say something about what the institute does and the role it's played, not just with the Hubble, but with many telescopes above our heads, a lot of other great observatories? Absolutely. And in fact, that's the incredible

vision of a man named Riccardo Giacconi, who was the person who really put together with the team the concept of having an institute dedicated to operating a great observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, but providing support for the scientific community to use the telescope. The traditional model is whoever can get the most money together builds a telescope and the people who are at the institution like the University of California or Caltech or someplace like that, they get to use the telescope and if they're really nice, they let other people use the telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope has been called the people's telescope.

Almost anybody in the audience today can propose to use the Hubble Space Telescope. The challenge is, if you have to learn how to operate the instruments on the Hubble and calibrate the data and remove the effect of cosmic rays and you know understand how to command and what filters to use and so on the technical detail it would be very challenging and so Ricardo Giacconi's vision was that there would be a group of people and they called it the Space Telescope Science Institute that would operate the telescope and would also support users by performing those calibration activities, removing the cosmic rays, fixing the defects in the detectors, all the behind-the-scenes stuff that's really very tedious and would have to be replicated over and over and over again by

every scientist. Instead, the Institute provides the research support so the astronomers can concentrate on the science. And this was at the time revolutionary. And there was a lot of pushback and it took a lot of convincing and was done long before the telescope was launched. And so it was a grand experiment. Build a telescope that anybody can propose to use and a research institute to support those scientists. And it has been an extraordinary success. It's one of the reasons why Hubble produces more than two scientific peer-reviewed publications a day, because the scientists can concentrate on the science.

And so if myself as an observer, personally, I'm using the Hubble Space Telescope on a project with Bill Sparks at SETI Institute to observe plumes of water around the moon Europa around Jupiter with the Hubble Space Telescope. And if we have a technical question, you know, we call up one of the supporting people and they help us solve it. You know, we don't have to figure it out on our own. And so the Space Telescope Science Institute was that experiment, extraordinarily successful. It will also be used to control and manage the science program for the James Webb Space Telescope. But because of its success, it was also replicated for the Spitzer Infrared Telescope. And at IPAC, at Caltech, they have a mini Space Telescope Science Institute. When the Europeans decided to

build the most powerful ground-based observatory ever called the VLT, it's actually four telescopes that they operate in the southern hemisphere, they built a telescope institute to manage that the same way of the space telescopes. So now in Europe, observers don't have to learn about how to use the telescope. They propose for the time it's selected and they have people down at the telescope who perform the observations for them, although they can go, and help them with all of the use of the instruments. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a radio telescope uses that model. So that's been replicated now and is the standard model for how to do science, at least in the astronomical realm. Very often there are studies done to try and replicate that.

For instance, the CASIS Institute for the International Space Station, you know, they tried to build a model like that. It's such different science and different application. It's had a lot of troubles. different science and different application, it's had a lot of troubles. But people try and replicate now the Space Telescope science experience elsewhere because of its great success. Definitely a part of the Hubble's legacy along with the Institute itself. I got just one more for you. You're an astrophysicist. You have often worked outside of the range of visible light in the electromagnetic spectrum. And as you said, the Hubble goes a little bit into the infrared, a little bit into the ultraviolet,

but other instruments like Spitzer and as far out as x-rays, right, Chandra, and cosmic rays, these advantages of working across the electromagnetic spectrum from space, this is just going to continue, right? I mean, we're not, you mentioned JWST, but the future for astronomy from space in space is pretty bright, isn't it? I think we are, folks talk about budget challenges and, you know, we can't do this mission and we can't do all the missions. And that's true. But I really believe that we are entering a truly golden age of astronomy and astrophysics and our knowledge of the universe in that we do still have Hubble. We're about to launch James Webb Space Telescope that opens up a whole new realm where we haven't explored very much yet at the high resolution and in the spectroscopy and breaking the light into its component parts.

and in the spectroscopy and breaking the light into its component parts. So James Webb will really be like having another Hubble in a new realm. But at the same time, we're opening up different areas. I think the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, which is a radio telescope international project, is the Hubble of radio astronomy. The first light has already occurred, but the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on the island of Maui in Hawaii is the Hubble Space Telescope of solar astronomy, and is going to give us the most detailed views of our own star and teach us probably more about stellar astrophysics than much of what's happened, because now we can see things at the scale of the

magnetic fields on the photosphere of the sun and study that. We're about to build something called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope that's going to scan the whole sky every few days and is going to be able to look at transient phenomena that we've never had access to, a whole host of other observatories, not the least of which is, you know, we're now entering for the first time in human history, the realm of gravitational wave astronomy. And, you know, the general topic is multi-messenger astronomy. This is one of the things that Hubble pioneered. It's working with Hubble and Spitzer and Chandra, all of the great observatories to put together the story about how things work in space. And it's only getting

better as time goes on. A bright future indeed. As you've demonstrated brilliantly, Hubble was built to be serviceable. We're getting questions from a number of our viewers, Patrick Harper, Andrew Planet, that I'll try and consolidate a little bit. Asking about like JWST, will it be serviceable? I happen to know, no, it won't be largely because it's going to be far away. But do you in general see that as a lesson for the future that we should be building these great instruments and other things in space? I mean, the ISS is an example, so that humans can go out there and upgrade them and repair them. Well, I have a slight twist on that, which is, yes, I actually think that, you know, when we invest billions of dollars in an observatory, you know, not just a simple

experiment, but something that's multi-purpose, and we want to last a long time, that it ought to be serviceable. And that decision on James Webb was made very early on. You know, there are a number of reasons why that decision was made. One of which is James Webb Space Telescope's going, you know, almost a million miles away from Earth. And it was imagined, well, nobody could get out there. But the other part of it is it's a cryogenic telescope and very delicate. To be able to be half the mass of Hubble. You know, you had to make a lot of trades in a very lightweight telescope. And it turns out that, you know, especially the sunshade that James Webb Space Telescope has to block the sunlight and earthshine from the telescope so that

it can cool down is extremely delicate. And so if you were to try and approach it, say, with the space shuttle, which could never get out there anyway, but just the plumes from the little rockets that slows down would probably cause that sunshade to fold up and that would destroy the telescope. So its inherent design is not serviceable and it was never intended to be. But I think future spacecraft should be, and in fact, Congress agrees with that, they actually put into an authorization act of NASA that future observatories, you know, they have to consider servicing. And as an example, the Wide Field Infrared Space Telescope that's currently being designed is being designed to be serviced.

But not necessarily by humans. For simple things, robots are perfectly good at turning a bolt, removing something, putting a new object in and turning the bolt again. And WFIRST will also be a million miles away near James Webb. And so it's perfectly appropriate that a robot could go out and put new batteries in or change out a scientific instrument or even better, refuel it so it has a longer lifetime. And I think a combination of those modes is what you want. If something is dull or really dirty or very dangerous,

let's send a robot. And robotics is making enormous strides. We're going to launch a mission. It was called Restore L. Now it's called OSAM-1 to go refuel a satellite in just a couple of years. And it has robotic arms and it's gonna demonstrate, you know, building things. I think we're gonna see on-orbit assembly and servicing

take on a bigger and bigger role, you know, as time goes on, as we have more capability. And certainly, if we're gonna go to Mars, we're gonna wanna assemble a spaceship first to go to Mars in. And so we need how to learn how to do that, as we did by assembling the International Space Station. On the outside of the International Space Station, we routinely use the robotic arm to replace components with no spacewalking at all.

The ground controls it. And, of course, we're only a couple of months away now from the next smart robot headed to the surface of Mars, Perseverance. This is from Jesse, who's an 11-year-old student in Virginia. Did John ever make a mistake in your maintenance of the work and upgrades of the Hubble Space Telescope that caused any kinds of issues? I mean, anything that ever happened up there that you kicked yourself about? So there's two ways to answer that, and thanks for that question. If you look at the end of the Hubble Space Telescope, there's a little white dome on the very back of the telescope,

and that's called the low-gain antenna protective cover. It's a fiberglass cover, and that cover is there so that if an astronaut is out spacewalking on the Hubble, like me, if you bump into it, you don't damage the low-gain antenna which is very delicate. And actually on our mission we did five spacewalks and Drew and I, you know, were highly trained. We did three of those five spacewalks. We pretty much went through all three spacewalks doing everything we were supposed to do and a little bit more and we didn't make any significant mistakes. And at the very end, the top of my helmet bumped into that antenna

after I'd taken the protective cover off and broke the tip off of it, which is another protective cover, which we grabbed the floating away tip. Drew captured that, but we had to go back out. I had to go back out and put that antenna cover on. And I kind of think it was destiny because the manager, the people who manage the operations of the telescope, had to manage the temperature of that antenna all the time because it would overheat. And when we put the protective cover back on, which was not intended to be left on the telescope, their thermal problems went away because the outside of that cover is white.

And now they don't have to manage that anymore. And it really didn't affect the transmission at all. I kind of think like Hubble reached out and wanted that. Well, Jesse, we're only human and space is hard. Because we're human, we have the smarts and the ability to recover from things like this, as you just heard. Here's a question that came in actually before we started the hour from Mike Helton. He's wondering about preserving the Hubble and why there isn't consideration for NASA to boost it into a higher orbit for storage for 100 years or more for future generations. Is there any thought about the distant future,

hopefully distant future of Hubble, when it finally is no longer operational? Well, like all satellites in low Earth orbit, and Hubble is orbiting about 600 kilometers above us, there is some atmospheric drag. And so over time, Hubble will slowly spiral in to our Earth's atmosphere. And it's currently estimated, because our sun has been incredibly quiet, that sometime

in the mid 2030s, there'll be enough atmospheric drag on the solar panels and on Hubble, that it won't be able to be an operable observatory anymore, even if everything is working on it. The atmospheric drag will cause enough disturbances. To cover that eventuality, inevitable eventuality, there is on the books a mission to Hubble, probably robotic, to install a deorbit module, which is a little rocket motor that will deliberately target Hubble into the Pacific Ocean so it doesn't hurt anybody. There's no reason why you couldn't use that same robotic mission and motor to send Hubble up to a much higher orbit. And it wouldn't take much more altitude to put it in a 1,000 or 10,000-year orbit.

The atmospheric drag drops off very quickly. And then it could be sort of a museum piece in space. Now, that's not without risk. First of all, you're deferring the problem to later generations, but I hope our space exploration plans are such that space travel becomes routine by 10,000 years from now, given our progress to date. If not, we're in big trouble for other reasons. But boosting Hubble does defer that problem to later, and there's always the risk of a satellite-satellite collision.

You know, Hubble doesn't have any propulsion to move away from an oncoming object. Anything you leave in space is a potential problem from space debris and things hitting it. So that is a concern. But there's no reason you couldn't boost it to a higher orbit. That's a policy decision. It'd be nice to see it sticking around as long as the pyramids for other, our descendants to marvel at. There's one more that I want to squeeze in because it's from eight-year-old Zoe in Colorado Springs who says, by the time I'm a grown-up and working with space telescopes, what kind of telescopes will I be working on if James Webb is then 30 years old? And she says, thank you, John. What's way out there beyond? What would you like to see 30, 40, 50 years away in space doing science for us? Well, thanks for

that question, Zoe. And in particular, because I grew up wanting to be a scientist and then in high school wanting to be an astronomer. I assumed, of course, that by the time I grew up, went to college, went to graduate school and became an astronomer, that all astronomers would go to space. It just seemed like, well, you know, astronomers go to mountaintops, but space is the place to be. So I thought it would just be a natural consequence of me being an astronomer. Really surprisingly, it worked out for me, but it's not the norm. And I hope for you that it will be, that space, although it will always be very dangerous, becomes more routine in the sense of access. Who knows, maybe if we can boost the Hubble, Hubble will still be there. My vision,

my dream, is that after James Webb and the things we have planned now will be bold, and that we will decide to build a 16 or 20 meter telescope. And by build, I really mean build, that robots and or robots and humans will assemble it, because that's too big to put a single rocket, that we will assemble a telescope that's big enough, that we will assemble a telescope that's big enough, and it takes 16 to 20 meters, that we will be able to look at the nearest 100 or so sun-like stars, stars like our own sun, to observe planets around those stars that are in the habitable zone and see if anybody's home. And that takes a 16 or 20 meter telescope, much, much bigger than Hubble, a little bit bigger, two or three times bigger than James Webb. You know, one of the things I'm working on

now is the technology with others at Goddard Space Flight Center, JPL, at various companies to design the technology to assemble a telescope like that, because it's a very practical thing to do. I'm convinced that in a couple of weeks, myself and a couple of other astronauts could assemble such a telescope with robotic support. We just have to make sure the technology is there that it would actually work, and lots of people are working on that.

I think this is kind of a extra detail, but the decadal survey for astrophysics is planning on what investments do we need to make and what do those future telescopes look like that we should start in the next decade so that when you grow up, you can either go up and assemble that telescope or perhaps be an astronomer and use that telescope to unravel further mysteries of the universe. What a great vision. Thank you for sharing that with us, John. Thank you for this past hour and for that matter, for helping the Hubble to continue to share its vision for perhaps years to come.

Thank you very much, Matt. It's been a real pleasure. Former astronaut and NASA Associate Administrator and Chief Scientist John Grunsfeld. Again, the video of this live event is at exploremars.org. Bruce and What's Up are seconds away. Hi, this is Kate from the Planetary Society. How does space spark your creativity? We want to hear from you. Whether you make cosmic art, take photos through a telescope,

write haikus about the planets, or invent space games for your family, really any creative activity that's space-related, we invite you to share it with us. You can add your work to our collection by emailing it to us at connect at planetary.org. That's connect at planetary.org. Thanks. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. The chief scientist of the Planetary Society is Dr. Bruce Betts.

He's back with us to explore the night sky and share a random space fact and all the other fun stuff that we have in store, including the space trivia contest. So stick around for that. Hope you will. I'm glad you're back. How are you holding up? Hunky-dory swell, Matt. How about you? Not bad.

Not bad. Not bad. It's, you know, it's getting to be kind of long, this sheltering in place. And we're still behaving out here at the Kaplan home. But it's getting more and more tempting to get out there. But home is so nice. I can't complain. Home is where the dogs are.

Well, dog singular in our case. But that'll do. He'll do. Dennis is great. And, you know, we got the sky overhead in the backyard. So we got a lot to look up to. Hey, I can tell you some things to look up to. Oh, how handy. Me.

Always. But also, you know, Venus has pretty much gone away in the evening sky, but I've made special arrangements with Jupiter and Saturn. They'll be coming to the real evening sky, but I've already talked them into coming up in the middle of the night. So if you're up midnight-ish, check them out in the east, rising together, Jupiter being the brighter of the two. They're also up in the south in the

pre-dawn. And also in the pre-dawn, you got Mars far off to the left of Jupiter. And in the evening sky, you can also, this one's tough, but you can check out Mercury low in the west. If shortly after sunset, if you've got a clear view to the horizon, it'll be looking like a bright star over there. So go have fun. Don't have to go far. Oh, actually one other thing to mention, which is the moon will be joining Jupiter and Saturn on June 7th and 8th, making for a lovely little combination. Nice. On to this week in space history, it was 2003 that Mars Express from the European Space Agency launched, headed towards orbit around Mars, where it's still partying. We shall move on to... Talking through a pillow?

In my mind. Nap time. nap time so doug hurley was the pilot of sts-135 the space shuttle mission that was the last human mission launch from u.s soil and he is the commander of spacex demo 2 the first human mission to launch from u.s soil since then which by the time a lot of people hear this will have happened it's the bad thing about coming out with this show every Wednesday morning. We won't be able to talk about the launch except to wish Bob and Doug Godspeed. Indeed. We shall move on to the trivia contest. I noted that the Cygnus cargo spacecraft NG-13 was recently released from the International Space Station. And I asked you, who was it named after?

How'd we do? Before we get to that, I mean, apparently Northrop Grumman likes to name these after lots of interesting space heroes. Pavel Kumeshia in Belarus said NG-12 was named after Alan Bean, who left those silver pins, astronaut pins on the moon that you were talking about just a few weeks ago. Yep. Now they've got all sorts of interesting people they've named them after. Well, I have our winner for this week. Do you want to fill us in on the answer before I reveal her name? Sure. So the Cygnus cargo spacecraft was named after Major Robert Henry Lawrence,

spacecraft was named after Major Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. He was a U.S. Air Force officer and the first African-American astronaut. He was unfortunately, at age 32, killed in a plane crash in 1967. They chose to honor him, as do we. Like a lot of his apparently classmates, among those Air Force would-be astronauts transferred to NASA. So he might very well have made it up there, I guess. Yeah, I should say he was selected as an astronaut in the Air Force's Manned Orbital Laboratory program, which was then canceled. But as you say, a lot moved over to NASA. So here's our winner, Elizabeth Spath, longtime listener, first time winner in Indiana. Congratulations, Elizabeth. We are going to make sure that you get, Elizabeth, Kevin Hand's new book, the one that we talked about with Kevin about a couple of weeks ago, Alien Oceans,

The Search for Life in the Depths of Space. We are getting all kinds of wonderful comments, compliments for Kevin on that conversation. And the book is at least that good. So, Elizabeth, we're glad to have you out there and glad to pass the book along to you as well. As always, we got some other stuff from Ola Franzen. This is interesting because it's not just the Robert H. Lawrence. It's the SS Robert H. Lawrence. Ola Franzen in Sweden said, it's amazing they got a steamship up that high. It takes big rockets.

Or is it the list of ship prefixes that needs a little updating, Ola says. I wonder, is it no longer steamship but spaceship? That'd be cool. Yeah, I believe it would go with spaceship rather than steamship. A lot of tributes to Mr. Lawrence from our Poet Laureate in Kansas, Dave Fairchild. Northrop Grumman gives their Cygnus spacecraft honored place by naming them for those whose roles were pivotal for space. An African-American named Robert Lawrence was the first to be an astronaut, for which we give applause. Mark Dunning in Florida, thank you for this. It led me down a

Wikipedia rabbit hole that was both sad and uplifting. And he adds, can we leave racism below the Carmen line, please? Well, that's a very good suggestion, Mark. So far, so good, I think, at least lately. And finally, Tony Knutson in Minnesota. Thank you to Robert and the many other men and women who have paid the ultimate price in our ongoing pursuit of the stars. Well done, Tony. It's very nice. Good sentiments. Very nice.

Thank you. Yeah. We're ready for another contest. Here's your question. Who is scheduled to be the first non-American astronaut to launch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon launch? Go to planetary.org

slash radio contest. So that is already scheduled? That's interesting. I knew that that's the plan, but I had no idea. Obviously, it's just scheduled. Missions could move around, et cetera.

But in terms of as of now, who's scheduled? You have until Wednesday, June 3rd at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer to this one. And we will have for the winner, how about a book? And this looks like a great book. I've only glanced through it. What Stars Are Made Of, The Life of Cecilia Payne Gabashkin, I hope is how it's pronounced. It's by Donovan Moore and Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astronaut, a great, sorry, great astronomer in her own right. And it's about another pioneering woman astronomer from the early 20th century, primarily. Fascinating story from the look of it. We'll have that book for you.

And how about we throw in, and we do mean throw, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid. We are hoping to once again start getting this stuff out from our office because our heroic colleague, Robin Young, is visiting there for at least part of a day each week and fulfilling some things like this. So thank you, Robin. And hopefully some of you will start actually seeing

some of your prizes that have been stuck there for a while. We did warn you. I think with that, we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about whatever happened to Microsoft's Snohomish font. Thank you and good night. Snohomish font. Thank you and good night. Snohomish. Is it gone?

How sad. Well, I'm going to stick with the font that I always use, which is, I forget what it's called, but it's the one that... Wingdings? Wingdings is great, but I've gone with the one that's based on the Lost in Space television series titles. Nice. He's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society,

who joins us every single week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members who see beyond the event horizon. Learn how to become one of us at planetary.org slash membership. Mark Hilverda is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Thanks for giving us a rating and review in Apple Podcasts. Stay well.

Ad Astra. Thank you.