[Music throughout] Tale of Two Telescopes:
Hubble Space Telescope and WFIRST. Wide Field Astrophysics.
Jason Rhodes: My name is Jason Rhodes, I’m the JPL
WFIRST project scientist, so that means I work with
scientists and engineers on the JPL side
to make sure that WFIRST is going to be ready for launch in the mid 2020s.
Karoline Gilbert: My name is Karoline Gilbert, I am an
astronomer at Space Telescope Science Institute where I am the WFIRST mission
scientist. Jason: So my career with the Hubble Space Telescope
started when I showed up at graduate school in 1994.
What happened was, I was assigned a supervisor,
in graduate school, and my supervisor, his name was Ed Growth.
And he had been one of the people that built one of the original
cameras for the Hubble Space Telescope. Karoline: I first started using data
and results from Hubble about 15 years ago. And that was to try to
reconstruct the collision of a small galaxy with a neighboring galaxy, Andomeda,
which is nearly a twin of our own large Milky Way galaxy. I started
working on WFIRST nearly 4 years ago, and my primary goal
for WFIRST is to maximize the breakthrough science that it will do across
all of astrophysics, from the solar system to the edge of the
observable universe, just as Hubble has. Jason: Hubble Space Telescope was
really transformative for the astrophysics community, and the way I like
to think of it is, one of the first things that everyone learns
about astronomy is the song “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” We all learn
that as a kid. And the irony of that
is that it’s not actually the stars twinkling, it’s the starlight
coming through our atmosphere that’s causing that twinkling, and that twinkling
of the starlight makes it harder measure things like the brightness of
stars, or the shape of galaxies. And so what we want
to do is we want to get outside of our atmosphere so we don’t have to
deal with that twinkling. So Hubble was really the first
telescope that rivaled ground-based
telescopes in size and capability that was above the atmosphere,
and got rid of that atmospheric twinkle. Karoline: It turns out that
we found that stars extend many, many times
farther out than the centers of galaxies where Hubble
is really good at looking. So in each image, WFIRST
will cover an area of sky 100 times larger than Hubble does
and that will allow us to survey the outskirts of galaxies, to
measure their true extent, to discover streams of stars that
indicate where small galaxies fell in and were torn about by the gravity of
bigger galaxies. And we’ll make these measurements for hundreds of galaxies
in the nearby universe. Jason: So, one thing I learned
from working on Hubble that will translate into WFIRST,
is as scientists, we have to be patient.
It can sometimes take a really long time to
process and understand our data, the images that we take,
and in the same way, it can take a long time to plan
and build and then finally fly a space telescope.
I was lucky enough to start my career on Hubble
having the data already, having the images already, but it took
me many years to process and understand what was in those images.
And I’ve been working on WFIRST under one name or another for 18
years, and so that patience I learned working on Hubble has really
paid off in being patient and persevering
with getting WFIRST going. Karoline: One thing I’ve learned from
working on Hubble is that the universe will surprise us, and
astronomers will be more creative than we can anticipate.
Astronomers have continued to think of exciting and unique questions to answer
with Hubble for 30 years, and now many astronomers
are answering entirely new questions using existing data in
Hubble’s archives. Since WFIRST will be like having
one hundred Hubbles all pointing together, and this massive amount of data
will be available right away, from day one scientists from
around the world will use data from WFIRST’s archive to
explore questions that we have not yet imagined.
[Explore]
[NASA]