A Portion of the New Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image (Image from hubblesite.org)
How does one go from being a Geek to becoming a GeekDad? For this GeekDad, the story is related to an image released Tuesday that was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. When I was fresh out of college, I was given the opportunity of a lifetime, the chance to work on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). I started by working with a team that built a system used in the testing of the scientific instruments on the ground and evolved that role into directly supporting the development and testing of new science instruments. I was sent out to Boulder, Colorado where the instruments for the next servicing mission were being developed, particularly, the next generation wide-field imager, the Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3). I knew from my start that the science and images taken by WFC3 would be extraordinary.
While I was living in Boulder, I met an extraordinary young lady working on her undergrad in Astronomy at the University of Colorado. We hit it off very well and when the time came for me to move back to Maryland and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center I think we both knew the separation would be temporary. Over the months until I proposed to her I continued working on WFC3, testing its systems and getting it ready for flight. The wedding came and due to schedule slips, ended up occurring in the middle of a major test effort. We even took a week to be at home between the wedding and the honeymoon so that I could work some late shifts of the testing, having traded shifts around with colleagues so that I could take the time off.
After the honeymoon, my wife got a job at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and ended up working on WFC3 testing herself. We had a few shifts where I was taking data with the instrument and she was doing the science analysis right behind me. I eventually moved off of Hubble to support the James Webb Space Telescope but my wife kept working WFC3 as part of her duties, keeping WFC3 in the family. She worked the final thermal-vacuum test years later, after delays due to the servicing mission being canceled and the return to flight effort after the Columbia tragedy. It was while she was working this final test campaign that she was pregnant with our son, who was delivered just a few months before the launch of Servicing Mission 4. We sat and watched the launch of Atlantis with our son on our laps, watching that science instrument that we were fortunate enough to be a part of ride into space.
The image released yesterday represents just some of the early science that is proving to be as extraordinary as had been anticipated by everyone during all those years of development. The image was captured in the area of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, previously imaged by other Hubble instruments. In this image, taken over several orbits, we see the deepest view of the universe ever captured, and it was captured with WFC3 in only a fraction of the time that other deep fields were captured.
What can you teach your own Geeklets from this image? For starters, only a couple of the points, I am calling it two, but I could be missing a couple, are stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. All of the remainder of what you see are other galaxies. The bigger, brighter galaxies are closer and younger. The points that are just pinpoints shown as red in this image are older and far more distant, going back to within a billion years of the Big Bang. Something that makes this so extraordinary is that the area of the sky covered by this image is just over 100 arc-seconds by 100 arc-seconds. That is 1/50 of a degree by 1/50 of a degree. In just that small area, digging very deep, we see a field where the Universe is filled with galaxies! I highly recommend downloading the highest resolution copy of the image that you can and looking through it with your kids at full zoom to look at the diversity of the galaxies and the detail captured.
I am extremely proud of the work I contributed to the success of WFC3. I was part of a very large and wonderful team of people, all of whom deserve recognition. Now the camera is in the hands of eager scientists who will continue to use WFC3 to make extraordinary discoveries for years to come. Looking over this image and seeing back billions of years I can’t help but also be proud of my own journey from bachelor engineer-geek to a very proud GeekDad.
