First Light, Twice Around

ASU astronomer Jeff Hester’s scientific career has followed many of the same ups and down as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) itself. In many ways, his story is a parable for the necessary resilience of the scientific ego. A story of how good science is done, no matter how imperfect the circumstances.

Fresh out of graduate school from Rice University, Hester took a position as a postdoctoral assistant at the California Institute of Technology. Hester worked for Jim Westfall, principal investigator for the Hubble project. Hester expected the Hubble to launch within a year of his arrival. Delay after delay postponed the launch. When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, NASA put all projects that required launch vehicles on indefinite hold. Hester found himself waiting for five years.

The HST was finally launched in 1990 and had its “First Light.” The first pictures were downloaded from the orbiting telescope and compared to ground-based images. Everyone expected success. Scientists expected to see images 10 to 15 times sharper than ever seen before. Instead, what the Hubble astronomers did do that day, in real-time and in front of a live audience, was discover that something was not right.

Hester was by then an associate member of the Hubble team.

“I had the dubious distinction of being the guy who produced that first picture,” he says. “It turned out that the telescope’s mirror had a spherical aberration.”

The images were flawed.

“It was one of the biggest debacles in the history of Big Science,” the ASU astronomer says. “You know you’ve got a problem when Jay Leno starts referring to a big mistake as ‘Hubbling something.’”

Hubble’s initial failure could have been a career-ending event for many scientists. To their relief, however, Hester and others found that they could still do good science with the flawed orbiting telescope. Part of their job became to figure out exactly what the flawed Hubble could and could not do. Their other job was to figure out how to eliminate the flaw.

In 1993, while a faculty member at ASU, Hester was a member of the science team that restored Hubble’s imaging capability with the second generation Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). It was a simple solution—the WFPC2 was given the same problem as the mirror, only in reverse.

The solution seemed easy, but the work to create and implement the solution was not.

“Building the second camera was a horribly difficult process,” Hester recalls. “We were building it in a fishbowl. Working 20-hour days. Everything that anybody did was looked at in so many different directions by so many different people. It really wasn’t the best way to do this kind of project.”

The work paid off. When “First Light” came again in 1993, Hubble finally had the capabilities its makers had intended. Hester and his colleagues were greeted with applause when they unveiled some of his first images at a special session during the American Astronomical Society meeting.

It has been more than 10 years since Hubble’s vision was corrected. During that time, Hester has become a leading authority on the interstellar medium. His famous image of the Eagle Nebula now graces a U.S. postage stamp.

“The work is great fun. It’s incredibly satisfying to have been part of bringing this capability into existence. Now I have the opportunity to use that capability to do some very fun science—the results of which really blow people away.”

Based in part on repercussions from the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, in January 2004, NASA decided not to send any more shuttle visits to the world’s first orbiting space telescope. By 2007, Hubble could die in orbit. Or it could last until 2011, depending on when its batteries and gyroscopes fail for good. When that happens, a visible eye on the universe will be gone.

But certainly not forgotten.

“We will suddenly feel blind,” says Hester. “Astronomers have gotten used to being able to image objects with far better clarity than is possible from the ground. Hubble has allowed us to take that capability for granted.”—Matthew Shindell