Supporting Hubble: Profiles

National
National Aeronautics
Aeronautics and
and Space
Space Administration
Administration
Hubble Profiles
Taken from:
Hubble 2012: Science Year in Review
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and the Space Telescope Science Institute.
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the telescope, and more. The complete volume and its component sections are
available for download online at:
www.hubblesite.org/hubble_discoveries/science_year_in_review
Immense loops and streams of dust with complex shapes appear prominently in the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1316. The distorted nature
of the dust lanes, along with the peculiar distribution of old star clusters recently detected by Hubble, both provide evidence that the galaxy
was formed from the merger of two gas-rich galaxies. NGC 1316 is located approximately 75 million light-years from Earth.
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Shown on the facing page, Herbig-Haro (HH) 110 is an energetic jet of gas originating from a newborn star. Such HH
objects come in a wide array of shapes but are created through the same underlying mechanism: twin jets of hot gas ejected
in opposite directions from a forming star that stream into and interact with material in the surrounding interstellar space.
Astronomers suspect that these outflows are fueled by gas accreting onto a young star surrounded by a disk of dust and
gas. When these energetic jets collide with cold interstellar matter, the gases within their shock fronts slow to a crawl. As
additional material continues to pour into the fronts, temperatures in these regions rise sharply and curving, flared areas
begin to glow.
HH 110 is unusual because it is composed of a single gaseous jet. Careful studies of its peculiar shape have repeatedly
failed to find the source star driving it. Astronomers have proposed that the nearby jet HH 270 (out of view) might actually
feed HH 110. In this scenario, HH 270 grazes against an immovable obstacle—a much denser, colder cloud core—and gets
diverted at about a 60-degree angle. This jet appears to go dark within the cloud and then reemerge as HH 110.
Credit for such images and discoveries, as well as the success of the Hubble Space Telescope in general, rightly belongs
to an entire “universe” of people and organizations. First and foremost are the citizens of the United States and Europe,
who have steadfastly supported Hubble over the years with their tax dollars and their enthusiasm. As a result, thousands of
astronomers from around the world have successfully used Hubble to probe the deepest mysteries of the universe and have
shared their discoveries through both professional publications and public outreach. Educators and students worldwide
have recognized Hubble as an important source of knowledge, excitement, and motivation about science.
A small cadre of astronauts from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have taken significant personal risk to service
Hubble , maintaining and upgrading the spacecraft to keep it at the forefront of astronomical research. Support from dedicated
personnel at the Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center made these servicing missions successful. The Science
Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters and the Hubble Space Telescope Project Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight
Center have led the Hubble program over the years, with major contributions to the observatory—both hardware and
people—also provided by ESA.
Hubble ’s highly successful science program has been organized and guided by the Space Telescope Science Institute,
operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under contract with NASA. Finally, many dedicated
NASA employees and dozens of first-class contractor organizations throughout the global aerospace industry have designed,
built, and successfully operated Hubble and its scientific instruments over a period spanning decades. All these people and
organizations should take pride in the scientific achievements described in this publication.
On the following pages, a small sample of individuals are profiled. They represent the larger group whose diverse skills
and backgrounds support the Hubble mission. Their unified commitment to excellence in their daily tasks illustrates what
ultimately forms the foundation of Hubble ’s success.
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Davis
Project Support Specialist
ASRC Research & Technology Solutions, LLC (ARTS)
Joni Davis has worked behind the scenes for 14 years to keep the Hubble Project operating smoothly. As a project support specialist,
she has a wide array of responsibilities, such as developing monthly status review presentations and operations schedules for Hubble
project managers, coordinating personnel office moves, creating building floor plans, and ordering computer and telecommunications
equipment. Joni has even contributed design ideas for Goddard-wide logo competitions.
Born in Baltimore, Joni considers Odenton, Maryland, to be her hometown. “I’ve supported Goddard my entire career, beginning as an illustrator
after graduating with a bachelor of arts in graphic design from Anderson University in Indiana in 1986,” Joni explains. While still in college, she
had the opportunity to do artwork for gospel vocalists Bill and Gloria Gaither, and Robert Irsay, then owner of the Indianapolis Colts.
Joni joined the Hubble team to support the STS-95 mission in 1998. That mission—which marked John Glenn’s return to space—
verified the effectiveness of equipment placed on Hubble the following year. Joni also recalls the honor of serving on the Video Imaging
and Photo Requirements team in May 2009 during STS-125, Hubble ’s final servicing mission. She was on the shift that worked while the
mission’s astronauts were performing spacewalks. Joni maintained the electronic imaging system and database. “I provided video files
and still images of specific areas of the telescope needing analysis to Hubble engineers,” Joni remembers. “Specific closeout photos of
newly placed hardware were taken in real time as shuttle crew members completed EVA [Extra-Vehicular Activity] tasks so modifications
could be photographically documented, to assist with the evaluation of anomalies and to plan for off-nominal tasks. This also helped
engineers on the ground to assess the tasks and ensure everything had been successfully accomplished.”
Joni appreciates the impact that Hubble has had on the public’s imagination. She explains, “Hubble ’s images create deeper wonder about
‘what’s out there.’ Every day people are enamored when they see what Hubble sees, images that provoke deep contemplation about what
actually surrounds us—an indescribably infinite creation.”
One of Joni’s favorite pastimes is selling sterling silver and gemstone jewelry, some of which she crafts by hand. Joni describes how her
business was born: “While vacationing in Arizona, a friend that lives there and I went to Sedona and we both just kind of went ‘jewelrycrazy.’ We found so many beautiful pieces at such reasonable prices, we knew that we could both start up our own businesses.” Joni sells
her jewelry at craft fairs and festivals throughout the year.
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Venturella
Facility Clerk
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA)
Mike Venturella keeps the rhythm of the day-to-day operations beating smoothly for the many Hubble scientists, engineers, and support
people who call the Space Telescope Science Institute (Institute) home. If a package or a person arrives, Mike is responsible for all that
comes into and goes out of the facility. Though his official title is “facility clerk,” that hardly begins to describe his role. Mike is known
as the “go-to” guy for all things facility-related. Mike helps keep the Institute running efficiently by managing all incoming and outgoing
mail and packages, and he occasionally serves in the shipping and receiving area to coordinate the transportation of large computer
equipment. Mike provides access cards for all guests and visitors and issues the photo identification for every new Institute employee.
He monitors the security staff at the reception desk during conferences and workshops, such as Hubble ’s Time Allocation Committee
meetings and the Hubble calibration workshops. When needed, Mike drives the Institute’s shuttle van for meetings and functions.
Quietly working behind the scenes, Mike makes daily life easier for the Hubble team at the Institute. Of his duties, Mike says, “It is my
privilege to support the people who run Hubble and who use the telescope to unlock such amazing discoveries.” A native of Baltimore,
Mike studied printing at Woodrow Wilson Vocational-Technical School. This eventually led to a contract position with Xerox in 1994
running the Institute’s copy center. There, he was responsible for printing large quantities of time-critical items, including Hubble press
release material and compilations of proposals submitted by astronomers for the use of the telescope.
For his excellence and dedication, in 1998 Mike received a service award from the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy
(AURA)—the consortium that operates the Institute. He was recognized for working seven days a week to complete books containing
roughly 1,000 proposals for Hubble observing time, which were compiled, printed, and distributed to 25 reviewers. Mike, who was the
first contractor ever to receive the AURA service award, ran the copy center until 2007. “Then, even though Xerox had lost its contract,”
Mike recalls, “the Institute asked me to stay onboard and offered me my current position.”
In his free time, Mike enjoys rooting for both the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles. As a part of this interest, he belongs to and plays softball
for a south Baltimore “Ravens Roost” club. “It’s a group that supports the Ravens and does a lot of charity work, too,” Mike explains. One
of the charity events is the annual Polar Bear Plunge—taking a quick January jump into the Chesapeake Bay to raise funds for the Special
Olympics. “Last year I raised the most money for my Ravens Roost,” Mike recalls with a sense of accomplishment. “I won a picnic table
autographed by Joe Flacco from the Ravens.”
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Haskins
Hubble Operations Manager
NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center
David Haskins credits his parents for his interest in space. “My dad was a science teacher,” David recalls. “I remember that when I was
young he would take high school students to the top of a hill behind our house to view planets with his telescope. My mom was interested
in astronomy too, and was always showing me different constellations. Together we followed many of NASA’s early space exploration
missions. Because of the two of them, I became fascinated with space and exploration.”
Born in Wellsville, New York, David graduated from Alfred State College with an associate’s degree in engineering science. He then
earned his bachelor’s in aerospace engineering from the University of Buffalo. “I was also interested in flying, so that’s where I took
the path of aerospace engineering,” he explains. When he graduated from college in 1988, he took his first engineering job at Johnson
Space Center on the Space Shuttle program. While in Houston, David was involved with the operational aspects of integrating payloads
into the space shuttle. He worked with astronauts to develop procedures for the operation and deployment of major payloads and for the
operation of in-cabin payloads, such as science instruments and the IMAX camera. In 1990, David provided this support for the Hubble
deployment mission. Three years later, he also supported the historic, first Hubble servicing mission. While at Johnson, David met his
wife Sujee, who also worked in the Shuttle program.
Two years later, when David decided to move back east, he accepted a position at Goddard as a systems engineer for Hubble ’s electrical
power system. He worked on Hubble for 14 years, supporting the next four servicing missions from Goddard. He then moved to the
Landsat Data Continuity Mission as a systems integration and test engineer. “I decided I wanted to see what else is out there besides
Hubble ,” David says, “But I couldn’t stay away.” After two years, he came back to Hubble as the Deputy Operations Manager and was
quickly elevated to the role of Operations Manager. In his current position, he is responsible for maintaining the health and safety of
Hubble and ensuring high efficiency on the return of recorded science data to the Space Telescope Science Institute.
David has a private pilot’s license, and he enjoys playing soccer and cycling. He and Sujee have three sons, Christopher, Nicholas,
and Zachary. “Mainly what I’m doing now is supporting my kids with their sporting and school activities,” David explains. “They’re all
involved with band, soccer, and other sports. I have a lot of fun with them—I wouldn’t trade it.”
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Kamara
Senior Resources Analyst
NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center
Although Roseline Kamara was born in Washington, DC, she grew up in the town of Abia, in the eastern part of Nigeria. “My parents came
to America to go to college,” she explains. “At the age of 4, we went back to Nigeria. The plan was not to come back; it was to grow up
there.” At 17, however, after finishing high school, Roseline returned to the United States to attend the University of Maryland University
College. In May 2001, she earned her degree in accounting and accepted a NASA contractor position as an accountant.
“The first program I worked on was Living with a Star,” Roseline recalls. This program studies the Sun and its effects on the Earth and the
solar system. “That’s how I started working with scientists. Then I moved onto the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) project,
which was also very fascinating.” After working six years as a contractor, Roseline joined the federal workforce in 2009 and was given a
detail as a budget analyst at NASA headquarters for a year and a half. There she assessed the programmatic and financial impacts from
high-level policy or budget changes made by Congress and the White House. When she returned to Goddard, in December 2010, she
split her time between Hubble and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter science missions.
When Roseline thinks about how she came to work for NASA, she credits her parents. “My father is an electrical engineer and my mother
is an accountant,” she explains. “That is where I got my love for numbers and calculations.” In her current role, Roseline provides
financial management on the Hubble science operations contract that NASA has with the Association of Universities for Research in
Astronomy to operate the Space Telescope Science Institute. This includes processing financial grants from NASA to other government
agencies, like the Jet Propulsion Lab. “I enjoy working on the grants for the Institute because then you see all the great work the PIs
[principal investigators] are doing. The grants have very impressive titles.”
Outside of work, Roseline’s life is devoted to her family. “I have three beautiful kids—Justina, Jessica, and Justin—and a wonderful
husband,” she beams. “My girls are twins, and they’re seven, and my son is nine. He was 22 months old when I had the twins, so they
were all in diapers at the same time. I felt like I had triplets!” Roseline also enjoys reading, watching movies with her husband Henry,
and visiting with her extended family.
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Liu
Science Instrument Software System Engineer
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA)
As a child from the small town of Huade in Inner Mongolia, China, Lily Liu heard many fairy tales about the Moon. Two of her favorites
were Chang Er and Jade Rabbit . “Chang Er is about a beautiful woman who went to the Moon,” Lily explains. “Jade Rabbit is about a
kind rabbit who sacrificed himself to feed the hungry, so he was turned into jade and sent to the Moon. I imagined the Moon as a nice
and cold place to live, and so I wanted to know about the Moon.” Lily also recalls the spring festival, when people enjoy the light of the
full Moon. In Inner Mongolia, Lily remembers, “There were no forests or mountains there. The sky seemed to touch the grassland below.
This view of the sky led me to wonder what space looked like.”
Lily’s curiosity about space was soon combined with her love of mathematics. She credits two teachers with fostering her enthusiasm.
“I had an excellent math teacher in the sixth grade,” Lily recollects. “He made boring math lessons interesting. There were no computer
majors at the time, but I started to love solving math problems.” She also fondly recalls a high school teacher who challenged her to
develop her math skills further.
Lily graduated from the Inner Mongolia Normal University with a bachelor’s degree in science. When her husband Derong came to the
United States to study at the University of Maryland, she accompanied him and earned a master’s degree in computer science from Hood
College in Frederick, Maryland. After working 10 years as a software engineer with Lucent Technologies, she joined Raytheon in 2005
to work on the Hubble project as a member of the science instrument flight software team. In mid-2012, she joined the Space Telescope
Science Institute as a software systems engineer developing commands for Hubble ’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope . “I had
never imagined or thought that I could work on Hubble ,” Lily says. “I was extremely excited and terrified at the same time at the thought
of the work that I was going to do. I was, and still am, fascinated by the intelligent people who put their integrity and diligent work into
Hubble .” Lily helped develop and maintain the software that supports Hubble ’s science instruments. She is particularly proud of the
work she did in support of Servicing Mission 4. This included developing and testing software releases for the newly installed science
instruments and the repaired Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Lily enjoys spending family time with her husband and her two daughters, Maddie, 13, and Miranda, 12. The whole family plays tennis
and is involved in church. Lily also spends a good deal of time attending her daughters’ swim meets.
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Collins
Senior Network Administrator
Lockheed Martin
Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in a little town called Princess Anne, Perry Collins studied electrical engineering at the University
of Maryland, the Eastern Shore. One winter, while digging trenches to pay tuition fees, Perry got so sick that he was hospitalized for two
months. “My mother and sister got their heads together and said, ‘He cannot go back out there on that job,’” Perry recalls. “So, they saw
a position open here at Goddard for a data clerk, and they asked me to apply for it, which I did. And once I got here, I began to see all
the great projects around me.”
That was 1979, and Perry has been at Goddard ever since. “I came in as a data clerk and then moved to a data technician. The next step
was computer operator, and after that was UNIX system administrator. My first 10 years were with the Nimbus program. After that, I was
with a project that flew small payloads of instruments and experiments aboard the space shuttle, and since then I’ve been with Hubble .”
Now, as senior network administrator, Perry is one of five administrators actively supporting between 500 and 600 people on the Hubble
and the James Webb Space Telescope projects. “Typically, we’re running in and out all day long, answering trouble tickets, doing security
items—patches, what have you—anything for the network that’s needed,” Perry explains. He has now been with Hubble for about 18
years—since before the second servicing mission. “I most enjoyed going to Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers during the servicing
missions to do the initial set-up to get the labs ready and to get the network online and ready for people to come in,” says Perry. “And
then to see the people start to flow in for their various duties. They’re always happy to see that there’s an admin around.”
Outside of Goddard, Perry is involved in a variety of charitable endeavors. “I work very closely with my church. I’m a lay leader, which
is pastoral assistant, and I’m president of the United Methodist Men at Queen’s Chapel,” Perry explains. “I provide free computer help
to schools and other church facilities.” Perry has participated in a think-tank for the National Institutes of Health on the subject of sickle
cell disease and has spoken twice at the National Sickle Cell Disease Association of America’s annual convention. He holds black belts
in Okinawa Ken Po and Tae Kwan Do, and he enjoys spending time with his wife, four daughters, and six grandchildren.
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Cheng
Physicist
Conceptual Analytics, LLC
Dr. Ed Cheng seriously considered being a medical doctor, even into his freshman year at Princeton. Then, he met Dr. David
Wilkinson and his life changed forever. Dr. Wilkinson, a Princeton professor of physics and a pioneer in the field of cosmology,
challenged Ed’s career choice. “He basically said, ‘Why do you want to be a doctor? There are so many more interesting things to
do,’” recalls Ed. “I started working for his group, and sure enough, he did have lots of interesting things to think about and do.” Dr.
Wilkinson became his advisor.
“My dad is an electrical engineer, so I actually came pre-fab with quite a bit of electrical tinkering ability,” Ed explains. “When I started
working for Dave Wilkinson’s group, I would make things work. They wanted to hook the computers up to the detectors so they could take
data in a certain way. And I think Dave quickly discovered that it was very useful to have me in his lab.” When Ed took a year off between
undergraduate and graduate school, Dr. Wilkinson invited him to work with the group full time. That’s when Ed first became involved with
NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE ), building prototype radiometers for the spacecraft. “He was a really great mentor,” Ed says.
“He knew what I could do better than I knew what I could do.”
Ed, who considers his hometown Old Tappan, New Jersey, graduated from Princeton with a bachelor of science, master of science,
and doctorate, all in physics. While completing a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with renowned physicist Rainer
Weiss, he continued to work on COBE with colleagues at Goddard Space Flight Center. Prior to Hubble ’s launch, he accepted a position
at Goddard leading the development of the next generation of Hubble instruments. “I actually touched Hubble when it was in the clean
room waiting to be launched,” Ed remembers. He spent his entire 13-year civil service career working on Hubble . In 2002, Ed left the
government to start his own consulting company, Conceptual Analytics. In addition to supporting Hubble , Ed works on a variety of other
projects. These include integration and testing of the James Webb Space Telescope instruments, the design of various other instrument
detectors, a dark-energy mission study, robotic servicing and refueling, and demonstrations for the International Space Station .
Ed enjoys cooking and spending time with his wife, Tamar Eskin, and their children, Colette, 11, and Zachary, 9. As Ed explains, “It is
important to have a good team, and it is important to feed them well.”
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Roberson
Project Assistant
CSC
Melissa Roberson grew up in a small town named Horntown on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. She worked at NASA’s Wallops Flight
Facility for eight years as an environmental specialist for CSC. “The contract ended in 1998,” Melissa remembers. “My project manager
asked me if I would be willing to relocate to Baltimore on a temporary basis to help support work at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
I have always been adventurous, so my answer was ‘yes.’ It was only supposed to last for six months. That temporary position became
permanent in 1999, and I’ve been here ever since.” While working at the Institute, Melissa earned a bachelor’s degree in business
management from the University of Phoenix.
Among her many duties as a project assistant, Melissa coordinates domestic and foreign travel for her fellow CSC colleagues, including
trips to professional conferences such as the American Astronomical Society meetings. Most of the people Melissa assists are in the
Hubble operations and engineering areas at the Institute, including those responsible for scheduling observations on the telescope,
analyzing the performance of its instruments, and processing the science data.
Melissa enjoys being known as “The Resource Person.” “I believe that you keep going until you get ‘yesses.’ You do not just take a ‘no’
and quit,” she explains. That tenacious attitude serves her well in her role of supporting the many diverse activities of the 75 employees
of CSC at the Institute. “I do anything from putting out fires with health benefits, to tracking costs and labor hours, to supporting the
work of the scientists,” Melissa says. “The greatest reward of my job is seeing the satisfaction on employees’ faces when I’m able to find
a solution to one of their problems.”
Melissa comes from a family of 10 girls and one boy. Although her sisters are scattered along the East Coast, they frequently hold
“Sisters’ Night.” “We’ll meet for a weekend and watch movies or have discussions of some of the battles that we’re facing,” she explains.
Melissa also enjoys participating in her church. “I like volunteering and I am most fulfilled when I work with senior citizens,” she says.
Melissa has one son named Brooks. As a devoted parent, she also has a message for fellow parents everywhere: “Support your children
in their science, math, English, and history interests. We need astronomers, computer scientists, engineers, writers, and historians in the
science field. You never know—your child might be the next astronaut!”
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Corderman
Senior Ground System Engineer
NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center
“I’ve wanted to work at NASA all of my life,” Elizabeth Corderman explains. Growing up in Hagerstown, in western Maryland, she won a
high school science fair prize that included a trip to Goddard. Elizabeth remembers, “I had enough sense to know that being an astronaut
wasn’t a very realistic career goal. It dawned on me that for every astronaut in space, there’s a bunch of people on the ground supporting
them—I could be one of those people!” While an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, College Park, Elizabeth alternated
semesters in class with those she spent as a co-op at Goddard. “I only applied to Goddard. I was very fortunate that I got the co-op
position, because at the time that was the only way to be hired here as a civil servant,” Elizabeth says.
Graduating from Maryland in 1995, Elizabeth earned a bachelor of science degree with a double major in math and computer science.
One of her first projects was preparing for the Terra mission, which studies the Earth’s atmosphere, continents, oceans, and radiant
energy. Elizabeth decided that once she completed her master’s in computer science, also from the University of Maryland, she was
going to leave Goddard and go to California to work for a tech firm. “Then one of the pieces of software I was working on got declared
launch-critical,” Elizabeth explains. “That meant they wanted software people in the control center a couple hours before launch in case
something happened.” To prepare for launch, the Terra project conducted full-up mission rehearsals that had the “look and feel” of
actual mission operations. “[Participating in these] was the coolest experience I’d had in my career and definitely one of my better life
experiences,” recalls Elizabeth. “I thought, ‘THIS is NASA!’ It got me hooked.”
She came to the Hubble project in 2009. As the technical engineer for the telescope’s ground system, she is responsible for every
piece of equipment on the ground that supports the telescope. Currently, she is involved in an effort to upgrade Hubble ’s ten-year-old
infrastructure so that it remains operational through the next decade.
Elizabeth’s life outside of Hubble revolves around her family. “My one brother lives in northern Virginia, and the other is back in
Hagerstown. And I’m really close to my parents. We love Maryland athletics. My family has season tickets for both basketball and
football. So far, I have two nieces and a nephew—in my opinion they are just the best thing ever. I like being an aunt very much.”
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Romelfanger
Principle Computer Scientist
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA)
Fred Romelfanger was a fifth grader in Oakland, California, when he first became fascinated with numbers. “I discovered the world
of math,” he recalls. “I thought it was the greatest thing!” In high school, he discovered the rest of the sciences, including physics,
chemistry, and higher levels of mathematics. He also dabbled in electronics while in high school. “Then I took a math class that also
had a side branch where you could do programming,” he remembers. “That’s where I discovered my love for programming. I said, ‘You
know what? I could do this for a living! I would enjoy this and it would be fun, and I wouldn’t have to work at it.’ That’s when it became a
hobby… that later turned into my career.”
In his senior year of college at New Mexico Tech, Fred was beginning to look for jobs when he saw positions posted for the Space
Telescope Science Institute. “I thought I could probably help them out with their computer needs,” he says. “I figured it was a way to give
back to society. That’s why it interested me.” After earning his bachelor’s degree in computer science, Fred joined the Institute in June of
1984. It is the first and only place he has worked since graduating.
A typical day for Fred often involves “firefighting”—dealing with issues in existing software where something needs to be fixed quickly.
Among his many responsibilities, he has programmed new capabilities for the Hubble archive, helped configure the grants management
software to make it more available to external users, and upgraded Hubble ’s ground system software when its corresponding hardware
was modernized. Fred also works on the Problem Reporting System, which is the software that tracks the problem reports for all of
Hubble ’s science operations software.
Aside from computers and software development—two of Fred’s favorite pastimes even outside of work—he is interested in robotics
and genealogy. He also enjoys spending time with his wife Mary and their children: daughter Jennifer, who is 24 and works in Seattle;
son Jonathan, who is 21 and attends college; and daughter Rebecca, who is 16 and attends high school.
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Venter
Test Engineer
Lockheed Martin
Ed Venter considers himself “a maintenance man” for the Hubble Space Telescope , not an astronomer. “I’m responsible for the heating,
cooling, power, and pointing of the satellite—that’s my interest,” Ed explains. “My whole Hubble career has been on the maintenance
side—not the science side—of the spacecraft. I’ve been involved in maintaining Hubble for the scientists who use it.” Now, as a test
engineer, Ed tests the software and hardware before installation on Hubble . “In general, if it’s used on orbit, it went through my group for
testing,” Ed says. “The developer or the vendor tests it, they hand it over to us, and then we test it in an operational environment before
it is used on Hubble .”
Growing up in New Milford, New Jersey, Ed had a far different goal. “I went off to college to learn how to be an automotive technician,”
Ed recalls. “The college changed the program to ‘mechanical technology’ while I was in school.” So Ed earned a bachelor of science
in mechanical technology from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. “When I graduated,” Ed remembers, “we were in a recession, so I
couldn’t find a job. I visited my brother in Sunnyvale, California. He worked for Lockheed on a contract with the Air Force, and he was
operating Air Force satellites. So I got into the satellite business that way—supporting on-orbit spacecraft—providing ground support,
command and control.” Ed has worked for Lockheed, now Lockheed Martin, since 1970. He has been supporting Hubble since 1984.
“I’ve seen the development—the early construction of the spacecraft. I’ve gone through the Challenger disaster, which delayed launch
by three or four years, and then the actual launch and all of the servicing missions.”
Over the years, Ed has held various positions where he analyzed Hubble ’s engineering data to ensure the spacecraft’s subsystems were
performing as designed. He has also managed a team to do the same. Ed’s broad knowledge of the spacecraft’s subsystems, and how to
control them, qualified him as a very knowledgeable tester. “The knowledge that I’d accumulated over the 20 years or so was an asset, in
that I knew what to look for and knew what certain things meant. If I saw something anomalous, I knew what the impact would be in orbit.”
In his spare time, Ed enjoys woodworking, and he works with school-aged children in a creative and problem-solving program called
Destination Imagination. “They’re appraised on factors such as teamwork and imagination,” says Ed. He is also very proud of his own
children—a college lacrosse coach, a pre-school teacher, and a college student in aerospace engineering.
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Oliveira
Instrument Scientist
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA)
Dr. Cristina Oliveira was born in Lisbon, Portugal, two months after the first Apollo lunar landing. “My parents had a special issue of
Life magazine about the Moon landing, and I was fascinated by the picture on the cover,” she recalls. “I remember asking, when I was
about seven or eight, why in the images the astronauts were floating when they moved around—but the rocks on the Moon weren’t. I
think that was the first thing that got me interested in space.” Cristina was also enchanted by the night sky and how the day transitioned
to darkness. “When I was a bit older, I also remember lying in bed late at night thinking about the ‘universe having no end,’” she says.
“I was really puzzled by that.”
Cristina’s parents provided her with a steady supply of science fiction, and she devoured it all. She also read every book written by Carl
Sagan. In high school, her favorite subjects were math and physics. “I loved that problems had a single answer and that the answer didn’t
vary from person to person, as opposed to literature, which is open to different interpretations,” she explains. She studied engineering
physics in college, and then traveled to the United States to attend graduate school at The Johns Hopkins University. “I was in a physics
program and then decided to switch to astrophysics—up to that point, I had never had an astronomy class in my life,” she remembers.
When she arrived at graduate school, the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) spacecraft, which was developed and operated
by Johns Hopkins, was two years from launch. Cristina’s undergraduate work provided her with experience that closely matched the
needs of the project, and she was selected to join the FUSE team.
Cristina earned her doctorate in 2003. Because of her work on the FUSE project, she was a natural choice for the position of instrument
scientist on Hubble ’s two spectroscopic instruments, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and the Space Telescope Imaging
Spectrograph (STIS). In this position, she oversees the entire team and works closely with the technical and team leads on instrument
and management issues. Her role focuses primarily on COS, which is in many ways very similar to FUSE .
Cristina lives in Baltimore with her husband, who works at Goddard. She loves reading, movies, traveling, and snorkeling. “Being from
Portugal, where a lot of emphasis is on spending time with family and friends eating, drinking, and talking, all of my weekends involve
at least one get-together with friends at someone’s house,” she explains.
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