Still high on Hubble

Rice retiree Bob O’Dell is space telescope’s longest-serving scientist

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Former Rice professor Bob O’Dell notes with some amusement that astronomers who use the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) ”tend to be younger.”

”They somehow think the HST was found under a pillow or bush one morning,” he said. ”They don’t think about the history.”

O’Dell thinks about it a lot. He was there.

Before and during his time at Rice, where he remains a Buchanan Professor Emeritus of Astrophysics, O’Dell was the chief scientist on Hubble, which had a troubled birth but has become a crown jewel in America’s science infrastructure. Now a Distinguished Research Professor of Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, he continues his investigation of the Orion Nebula via the Hubble — though he now has to fight for access like everybody else.

Upon the Hubble’s launch from the bay of the shuttle Discovery in 1990, O’Dell said he was granted guaranteed observer time, to be used in the first few years. ”But when the mirror problem surfaced, all of us were given the choice of using some or part of our time then or delaying it, gambling that the fix was going to be good. I gambled, and it paid off.”

That payoff came three years after launch with the first of five service missions to the Hubble, which delivered corrective optics to fix a problem that made its early photos blurry. The final mission — rescheduled to May 12 after the failure of a computer on the Hubble scuttled an October launch — will have Rice adjunct professor Mike Massimino aboard the shuttle Atlantis. It will launch from Cape Canaveral, and O’Dell plans to be there to send it off.

It will be another milestone in a long and satisfying journey for O’Dell, who began his association with Hubble 11 years before he came to Rice in 1982. Nobody has been continuously associated with the Hubble longer than O’Dell.

The concept of the Hubble had been proposed by the American Astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer in 1946 and construction of the telescope was begun in 1978. The Hubble had been scheduled to launch late in 1986 when the Challenger explosion delayed its deployment four years.

O’Dell spent his early years on the project selling the idea to fellow scientists and Congress. ”Many ground-based astronomers felt it wasn’t worth the risk,” he said. ”They felt it was wiser to spend that money on multiple ground-based telescopes, which would continue to produce the same kind of data they’d been collecting for years — but lots of it. It took a few years to convince key people that the space telescope was worth it.”

Was it ever. Having completed its 100,000th orbit of Earth last August, the eye in the sky has returned a steady stream of data and photos for astronomers to study and space fans to ogle. It will take years to analyze it all, if such a thing is possible, said O’Dell.

”The reference date for the Hubble’s lifetime, when it was built, was 15 years, and the nominal time between service missions was to be three years, so five missions was always the expectation,” said O’Dell, who feels Hubble can reasonably be expected to last another five years with the repairs and new devices, perhaps longer for some of the instruments.

”What we knew would be the case, and has proven to be true, is that you don’t need all of the scientific instruments to do great science 100 percent of the time,” he said.

O’Dell stopped spending all his time on Hubble when he left the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., in 1982 to come to Rice. Construction of the telescope was essentially done; moving to Houston allowed him to stay onboard as chief scientist for another year and as part of the team for many years thereafter.

”We thought at the time it would launch in 1985, and NASA wanted a full-time scientist on it. But I didn’t want to go back to work for NASA, especially since the observatory was essentially complete. Rice allowed me to stay involved by giving me a flexible schedule.”

As part of the Space Physics and Astronomy Department at Rice, O’Dell taught astronomy ”and what we called ‘Physics for Poets,’ a course for undergraduates who weren’t mathematicians, but needed courses to satisfy their science requirements.”

He recalled with satisfaction the Hubble-based research by his Rice colleagues Reginald Dufour and Patrick Hartigan, both still professors of physics and astronomy at Rice, and is particularly proud of his work as adviser to Takao Doi, Japan’s first man in space, who earned his doctorate of philosophy in astronomy at Rice in 2004. Doi has flown on the space shuttle twice, in 1997 and in early 2008.

”I miss Rice, but I didn’t want to stay in Houston forever, and Vanderbilt gave me the opportunity to return to research full time,” said O’Dell, who continues to pursue his study of the Orion Nebula, focusing on detailed measurements of stellar winds and, more recently, on the construction of a three-dimensional picture of the nebula based largely on comparisons of 15 years of Hubble photographs.

”I’m still trying to figure out the damn thing,” he said of the nebula, his first destination upon getting a telescope as a child. O’Dell’s book, ”The Orion Nebula: Where Stars Are Born,” was published by Harvard University in 2003. ”You go through phases where you think you know everything, then you think you know nothing. But I’m getting there.”

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY Before and during his time at Rice, where he remains a Buchanan Professor Emeritus of Astrophysics, Bob O’Dell was the chief scientist on the Hubble Space Telescope. Click here for a history of the Hubble Space Telescope at the excellent Hubblesite.org. Click here for information about O’Dell’s book. Click here to download O’Dell’s own Power Point history of his involvement with the Hubble. Click here for NASA updates on the launch of STS-125 to the Hubble, scheduled for May 12. NASA O’Dell continues to pursue his study of the Orion Nebula, focusing on detailed measurements of stellar winds and, more recently, on the construction of a three-dimensional picture of the nebula based largely on comparisons of 15 years of Hubble photographs.