Engineering Colloquium Home
Schedule for this lecture.
Engineering Colloquium Home
Schedule for this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, April 20, 1998
The current status of HST will be described, together with plans for the future servicing missions. Some of the science that has come out of the telescope will be discussed, including the programs to measure the Hubble constant and deceleration parameter; distant supernovae; gamma ray bursts; and inhomogeneities that have been observed in various objects. Also, a summary of the results obtained to date on the Hubble Deep Field will be given.
Dr. Robert Williams has been Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore since 1993. The Institute, together with Goddard Space Flight Center, operates the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. Before assuming his present position Williams spent 8 years in Chile as Director of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, which is the national observatory of the U.S. in the southern hemisphere. Previous to that time he had been a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona in Tucson for 18 years. Dr. Williams' research specialties are novae, which are exploding stars, and spectroscopy, which is the analysis of light from distant objects. More recently he has also devoted considerable effort to defining programs for the Hubble Telescope to study distant galaxies in the early universe.
As Director of the 400-person Space Telescope Science Institute, which is situated on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Robert Williams oversees the entire science program and scheduling and operation of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). An active research astronomer for all his professional life, Williams is a strong champion of public outreach and education in science, and he has lectured widely on astronomy and the recent scientific results that are coming out of HST.
Dr. Williams originates from Southern California and received his A.B. degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962, and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1965. He was a Senior Fulbright Professor at the University of London from 1971-72, and was granted a prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Award by the German government for research and study in Heidelberg in 1991-92. He has authored over 100 professional research papers in the astronomical literature on a wide variety of topics. An avid runner and cyclist, he is also an enthusiastic student of the history of polar exploration and research. He currently resides in Baltimore with his wife, Elaine, a pediatric psychologist whose specialty is developmental disorders and autism.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Barbara Pfarr
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