Of all her achievements, I asked her what she was most proud of.
It was designed for a 3-year life and was turned off after 18 years. It’s a satellite that in synchronous orbit so it stays at the same longitude. It goes north to south to some extent. It can be operated from the ground much the way any ground based telescope is operated. The Hubble you have to decide weeks in advance what you want to do, send commands, tell it a week or more ahead what you want to do, then it does it and sends down the data. If you find you should have exposed for two hours instead of one, there’s nothing you can do about it except go back and do it again.
This IUE, that’s what we call it because the name’s too long, being in synchronous orbit, the astronomer can watch the data as it comes in and adjust what he’s doing accordingly and he can make changes in his program and if he starts out at night and realizes it’s not what he wanted he can change what he planned as he’s doing it. That makes it very convenient.
I’ve been told that half the astronomers in the world have used that satellite. Even if that’s only half the observational astronomers in the world, that’s a pretty large number, relatively speaking, there’s not a lot of astronomers all together, but even then. I’m particularly proud of it for that reason. It generated several thousand, four or five thousand, refereed scientific papers in its lifetime, and the data in the archives is still being used, twenty years after it was turned off.
I think it was launched in 1978, and if that is right it would have been 1996 that it was turned off. I’m not sure if that is exactly those dates. That was the magnitude."
"Well, the first orbiting astronomical observatories (OAO) going up were for the sun. The sun is a little easier (than stars.) You only have one thing and it’s bright enough that you can take short exposures."
I asked about the launch vehicle used in those early days to get the satellite into space.
"The first one was Atlas. Primarily, the solar work was unmanned, as the Hubble is. It’s a smaller satellite. In fact there is a picture of a model, with me, that’s fairly common.
The first stellar astronomy was the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, and the first successful one was 1968 (which is why I thought 1962 was a little early to build a 120-inch [telescope lens]) (laughs) and it was like the Hubble, it was general purpose. It was looking at a number of things."
"At 3:40 a.m. EST on Saturday, Dec. 7, 1968, just three weeks before the highly anticipated launch of Apollo 8 and the first crewed flight to the Moon, an Atlas-Centaur rocket carrying NASA’s heaviest and most ambitious unpiloted satellite at the time blasted into the sky from Launch Complex 36B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
Formally known as the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO) 2 and nicknamed Stargazer, it would become NASA’s first successful cosmic explorer and the direct ancestor of Hubble, Chandra, Swift, Kepler, FUSE, GALEX and many other astronomy satellites.
OAO 2 provided the first orbital stellar observations in ultraviolet light, shorter than wavelengths in the visible range spanning 3,800 (violet) to 7,500 (red) angstroms. Much of UV light is screened out by the atmosphere and unavailable to ground-based telescopes. Stargazer’s experiments made nearly 23,000 measurements, showed that young, hot stars were hotter than theoretical models of the time indicated, confirmed that comets are surrounded by vast clouds of hydrogen and discovered a curious feature of the interstellar medium that would take decades to understand."
“OAO 2 was a learning experience,” said Nancy Grace Roman, the first chief of astronomy in the Office of Space Science at NASA Headquarters, Washington. “We had to learn how to point a telescope to a single object and hold it there for a half hour or so.” This makes OAO 2 the ancestor of all space telescopes that can point to a given spot on the sky and track it for an extended period.