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[Music throughout] Tale of Two Telescopes: 

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Hubble Space Telescope and WFIRST. Wide Field Astrophysics.

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Jason Rhodes: My name is Jason Rhodes, I’m the JPL

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WFIRST project scientist, so that means I work with

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scientists and engineers on the JPL side

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to make sure that WFIRST is going to be ready for launch in the mid 2020s.

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Karoline Gilbert: My name is Karoline Gilbert, I am an

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astronomer at Space Telescope Science Institute where I am the WFIRST mission

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scientist. Jason: So my career with the Hubble Space Telescope

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started when I showed up at graduate school in 1994.

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What happened was, I was assigned a supervisor,

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in graduate school, and my supervisor, his name was Ed Growth.

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And he had been one of the people that built one of the original

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cameras for the Hubble Space Telescope. Karoline: I first started using data

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and results from Hubble about 15 years ago. And that was to try to

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reconstruct the collision of a small galaxy with a neighboring galaxy, Andomeda,

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which is nearly a twin of our own large Milky Way galaxy. I started

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working on WFIRST nearly 4 years ago, and my primary goal

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for WFIRST is to maximize the breakthrough science that it will do across

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all of astrophysics, from the solar system to the edge of the

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observable universe, just as Hubble has. Jason: Hubble Space Telescope was

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really transformative for the astrophysics community, and the way I like

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to think of it is, one of the first things that everyone learns

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about astronomy is the song “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” We all learn

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that as a kid. And the irony of that

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is that it’s not actually the stars twinkling, it’s the starlight

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coming through our atmosphere that’s causing that twinkling, and that twinkling

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of the starlight makes it harder measure things like the brightness of

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stars, or the shape of galaxies. And so what we want

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to do is we want to get outside of our atmosphere so we don’t have to

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deal with that twinkling. So Hubble was really the first

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telescope that rivaled ground-based 

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telescopes in size and capability that was above the atmosphere,

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and got rid of that atmospheric twinkle. Karoline: It turns out that

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we found that stars extend many, many times

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farther out than the centers of galaxies where Hubble

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is really good at looking. So in each image, WFIRST

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will cover an area of sky 100 times larger than Hubble does

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and that will allow us to survey the outskirts of galaxies, to

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measure their true extent, to discover streams of stars that

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indicate where small galaxies fell in and were torn about by the gravity of

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bigger galaxies. And we’ll make these measurements for hundreds of galaxies

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in the nearby universe. Jason: So, one thing I learned

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from working on Hubble that will translate into WFIRST,

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is as scientists, we have to be patient.

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It can sometimes take a really long time to 

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process and understand our data, the images that we take,

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and in the same way, it can take a long time to plan

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and build and then finally fly a space telescope.

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I was lucky enough to start my career on Hubble

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having the data already, having the images already, but it took

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me many years to process and understand what was in those images.

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And I’ve been working on WFIRST under one name or another for 18

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years, and so that patience I learned working on Hubble has really

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paid off in being patient and persevering

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with getting WFIRST going. Karoline: One thing I’ve learned from

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working on Hubble is that the universe will surprise us, and

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astronomers will be more creative than we can anticipate.

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Astronomers have continued to think of exciting and unique questions to answer

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with Hubble for 30 years, and now many astronomers

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are answering entirely new questions using existing data in

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Hubble’s archives. Since WFIRST will be like having 

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one hundred Hubbles all pointing together, and this massive amount of data

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will be available right away, from day one scientists from

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around the world will use data from WFIRST’s archive to

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explore questions that we have not yet imagined.

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[Explore]

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[NASA]

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