Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, April 14 2008 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Matt Mountain
"The Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope and looking to the future: space science at a cross road?"
ABSTRACT -- After eighteen years of observing the Universe, the Hubble Space Telescope is about to be upgraded and repaired by NASA’s Shuttle astronauts in the summer of this year. This will breathe new life into a telescope that has been described as the most productive in history. This talk will discuss some of Hubble’s results, describe what we hope to achieve in this last servicing mission, and how we manage the Hubble science operation on behalf of NASA and the science community. In addition I will show how some of the science programs and the way we operate Hubble are paving the way for a very different space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The James Webb will open up new opportunities for space science in the same way the Hubble did in the 1990’s. I will also discuss briefly the challenges of launching a 6.5m cryogenic telescope out to L2. As we look to the future, how this perspective has led the Space Telescope Science Institute to take another look at our successful partnership with NASA’s human spaceflight program as we explore the types of space observatories we will need in the 2020 timeframe.
SPEAKER -- Matt Mountain is Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Telescope Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Oxford and at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Mountain received a bachelor's degree in physics and a doctoral degree in astronomy from Imperial College, London. At the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, he developed infrared instrumentation as part of building the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope in Hawaii.
He then moved to Tucson as Project Scientist (later Director) of the Gemini 8-meter Telescopes Project, eventually moving to Hilo, Hawaii to help set up the observatory there. This included setting up an adaptive optics group.
Matt is involved in other large telescope proposals, including the Thirty Meter Telescope project. He is a fellow of the American Astronomical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has received an award for excellence in education for the Gemini StarTeachers program from the Ministry of Education in Chile (location of the other Gemini telescope.)