"It was magnificent. It's the size of a school bus. It weighs about 24,000 pounds."
Linda Abramowicz-Reed
The Hubble Space telescope shot into orbit 25 years ago on Friday. I spoke with a Connecticut engineer who worked on the project, which forever changed humanity's view of its place in the cosmos.
Back in the early 1980s, Linda Abramowicz-Reed was a graduate student at Boston University who had just gotten her masters degree. She was looking for work. "I saw the ad in the paper and I thought, 'This is my dream job,'" she said.
The ad was for a job working on the Hubble Space Telescope at an engineering firm later acquired by United Technologies in Danbury.
Today, Abramowicz-Reed lives in Newtown, and she still works at UTC as a systems engineer.
Back then, her task was to work on the Hubble Space Telescope's fine guidance systems: three baby-grand-piano-sized pieces of technology that focus on stars, stabilize the telescope, and help ensure it produces crystal-clear images.
"They're so, so sensitive, that they could detect the width of a human hair three or four miles away," Abramowicz-Reed said.
Abramowicz-Reed recalled seeing Hubble in person before it launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1990. "It was magnificent," she said. "It's the size of a school bus -- like 43 feet. It weighs about 24,000 pounds. So it's immense."
In orbit above the Earth, where its free from atmospheric interference Hubble has opened up new windows to the universe that we never imagined. It's given us pictures of planets, of stars, and some of the deepest galaxies in the universe.
"There's so much. Hubble is opening questions as to dark energy and dark matter. Star formations. Like you see in some of the famous pictures. The 'Pillars of Creation,' 'The Horsehead Nebula,' which is part of the Orion nebula. So it opens up more questions to me as to how stars are forming. How galaxies formed in the early age of the universe, which, by the way hopefully the successor of Hubble, which is James Webb, will give us more answers to."
The James Webb telescope is scheduled to launch in October 2018.
