LAS Meeting on October 15, 2009 at 7:00 pm

The Longmont Astronomical Society will meet 7 to 9 pm in the Community Room (Rm #1480-82) at the Front Range Community College, 2190 Miller Drive, Longmont, CO on Thursday, October 15th.

The speaker will be Dr. Dennis Ebbets from Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, CO. Dr. Ebbets has worked primarily on science instruments for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and on design studies for instruments for other NASA missions. He is a member of the Investigation Definition Team for the Hubble Telescope, participating in both the calibration activities and astronomical research program of the observatory. Dr. Ebbets holds an undergraduate degree in physics from West Virginia Wesleyan College and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Colorado.

He will briefly the design and construction of the Hubble Space Telescope. Its hardware, its launch into orbit, and its use by astronomers here on Earth. Because it plans to support a twenty year mission NASA conducts service missions every few years to make repairs and to install updated equipment. Astronauts have visited the telescope five times since its launch in 1990. We will see slides of the astronauts' pre-launch training and extra-vehicular activities during the missions. We will describe the repairs and upgrades which were made, and how they have enhanced the capabilities of the observatory. We will also discuss some of the important scientific results obtained with Hubble over the last few years. Examples will include planets in our solar system, the formation of new stars and possibly solar systems in the process of forming around very young stars. Debris from exploding stars and infant galaxies in the far reaches of the universe have also been photographed by Hubble.