The Hubble Space Telescope: Insights from a former Hubble Engineer

The Heart of the Valley Astronomers present a talk by Tom Styczynski, a retired Lockheed Martin senior staff engineer who spent 16 of his 35 years there on the  Hubble Space Telescope program.

In years of operation the Hubble Space Telescope has provided millions of observations resulting in over 13,000 scientific papers while filling newspapers, magazines and on-line sources with amazing photos of the universe that surrounds us. This scientific success reflects the efforts of the hundreds of engineering and supporting personnel that designed, built, tested, launched, serviced and continue to operate this amazing spacecraft.

The presentation will provide an insight into the spacecraft design with a particular focus on the challenges of servicing in space; a look into the first servicing mission that addressed the problem with the optics and images that the proved Hubble Space Telescope was operational.