ABSTRACT

December 2 marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Astro-1 mission (STS-35, Columbia), the first Space Shuttle mission devoted entirely to astronomy. Filling Columbia’s bay was the Astro-1 payload, which included three ultraviolet telescopes and one X-ray telescope. The UV instruments, coaligned on the same pointer, were the the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT; Arthur Davidsen of JHU, PI); the Wisconsin Ultraviolet PhotoPolarimeter Experiment (WUPPE; Art Code from Univ. of Wisconsin Madison, PI); and GSFC’s Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UIT; Theodore Stecher, PI). The X-ray instrument, on a separate pointing system, was GSFC’s Broad Band X-ray Telescope (BBXRT; Peter Serlemitsos, PI). The UV telescopes were operated directly from the cargo bay, with astronaut-astronomers teaming with science and engineering teams on the ground to operate the telescopes. During its nine-day mission, Astro-1 performed groundbreaking astronomical observations, overcoming a remarkable set of operational challenges. This talk will present a retrospective view of the mission’s legacy, peppered with stories about the challenges of using the Space Shuttle as a platform for astronomy.

About the Speakers:

Dr. William P. Blair is an astrophysicist and Research Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University. He currently splits time between ongoing research projects at Johns Hopkins and as a planning system scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, working on development activities for the James Webb Space Telescope project. Dr. Blair obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Michigan in 1981 and spent three years at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics before coming to Johns Hopkins in 1984. From 1996 to 2009, Dr. Blair worked on the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) project at Johns Hopkins, serving as Chief of Observatory Operations through most of the operational phase of that mission. Prior to FUSE, Bill worked for many years on the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope (HUT) project. HUT flew twice on the space shuttle (on STS-35 Astro-1 in 1990 and STS-67 Astro-2 in 1995). Dr. Blair is also a user of various instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and other space-based and ground-based facilities.

Dr. Francis Marshall is an astrophysicist in the Astrophysics Science Directorate of Goddard Space Flight Center. Dr. Marshall received a B.S. in physics from the University of Miami in 1970 and a Ph.D. in physics at Caltech in 1977 under the supervision of Professor Edward Stone. Since coming to GSFC, he has worked on a series of high-energy astrophysics missions including the A-2 experiment on HEAO-1, the Rossi X-ray Time Explorer, and the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst explorer. He served as the Deputy Principal Investigator for the BBXRT experiment on the Astro-1 Shuttle mission. His primary research interests are Gamma-Ray Bursts and pulsars.