The Hubble telescope celebrates its 20th anniversary. Besides opening our eyes to the wonders of space, it has spawned new technologies with major benefits for earth. Among them:
- Sharper CCDs for detecting breast cancer:
http://ipp.nasa.gov/innovation/Innovation35/Hubble.html
- The Globalstar worldwide, satellite-based phone system
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/01/990118075743.htm
- Hubble IMAX CD cinema at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex:
http://nssflorida.org/2010/03/23/hubble-imax-3d-comes-to-ksc/
- Early specifications issued to lithium battery manufacturers:
www.battcon.com/PapersFinal2007/ScuillaPaper2007.pdf
- New composite materials for lightweight equipment carriers made in Virginia:
Super Lightweight Interchangeable Carrier (SLIC)
- New theories about time, matter and space from our discovery of new phenomena in the universe, which will influence the direction of future scientific and technological research on earth.
There are many more technology spinoffs from the Hubble project, both potential and already commercialized, which indicates the value of this project.
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4 months ago
Sheridan -
ReplyDeleteThere is much much more than that even. As one of the first 10 employees of the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, (it was called only the Space Telescope Science Institute then), I would like to share a few more:
- Desktop imaging programs such as Photoshop. We built scientific imaging applications, complete with plugin architecture, which for all intents and purposes is commercialized as Photoshop and its kin now. This was roughly from 1982 to 1985.
- Image archiving applications. I had done some innovative earlier work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center regarding the storage and querying of large databases of images from the operations prior scientific satellites, and some of this work was carried through HSTSci as well. Today we see its progeny in such services as flickr, and desktop archiving of images from our digicams. Such now-common indexing techniques such as tagging also arose at that time.
- Scheduling algorithms. The very first matter I worked on was to get a handle on the complexity of actual scheduling of the resources on the satellite for scientific use.
There are physical constraints in creating a schedule such as the fact that the satellite is twirling in space with 6 degrees of freedom while in orbit around the earth, and also occlusion constraints since large objects nearby such as the earth and the moon are not transparent.
Couple these with limitations on the instrument itself - heat, light sensitivity, and ability to move freely when needed or stay locked on a particular target and NOT move relative to the target and you are starting to get a sense of the scale of the problem.
This work also dates back to 1982 at least, and all I can say about that is, on behalf of the Hubble Space Telescope, let me say, "Thank goodness for Moore's Law."
- PR and Education techniques. We knew from the very beginning that this was a project that would last for decades, and that we would have to work to maintain support from the American people and indeed the world, and to share the science with them.
Deep in the heart of everything surrounding the Hubble is the joy and love of learning, of exploring, of innovating, and of taking risks to do so. It was our great pleasure to decide in a small meeting room in Latrobe Hall on the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus in 1982 that in addition to operate the scientific operations of the satellite, our mission would equally be to share what we were doing with the public, and to invite the public's fascination and feedback and even participation in the science project itself.
That this project is still front page news almost 30 years after that meeting is probably unprecedented in the annals of science or pretty much any positive endeavor.
I am proud to have been associated with all of these benefits and even more so been able to kickstart and enable the wildly successful scaling of all of this and more during my time there.
Barry Caplan