Astronomers Still Look to Hubble Space Telescope
28 August 2011Nancy Grace Roman, center, with President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office at the White House in 1962.
This is the VOA Special English Technology Report.
The Hubble Space Telescope continues to make valuable discoveries after more than twenty years in orbit around Earth.
Hubble recently showed a fourth moon orbiting Pluto. Astronomers temporarily named it P4. The moon is the smallest to be discovered around the icy dwarf planet.
Astronomers estimate that the moon is from thirteen to thirty-four kilometers across. They first saw it in a Hubble photo taken on June twenty-eighth.
The American space agency NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope in nineteen ninety. Reaching that day took years of work. Ed Weiler is NASA’s chief astronomer. Mr. Weiler has worked closely with the Hubble program since nineteen seventy-nine.
ED WEILER: “The Hubble, when it was launched, represented an increase in capability of other telescopes on the ground by a factor of ten. The last time in human history in astronomy that we leaped a factor of ten, in one step, was when Galileo stopped using his eye and put the first telescope to his eye.”
Nancy Grace Roman, 86, was NASA's first chief of astronomy and is considered the 'mother' of the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA's first chief of astronomy was Nancy Grace Roman. Ms. Roman joined NASA in nineteen fifty-nine. She led the effort that resulted in the creation of the Hubble Space Telescope.
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