The Hubble Space Telescope, built at Lockheed Martin's Sunnyvale plant, is the size of a Greyhound bus and weighs more than 25,000 pounds. The space observatory orbits 360 miles above the earth every 90 minutes.
Photo courtesy of National Aeronautics Space Association
Team Work
Los Gatos couple helps NASA get the Hubble Space Telescope back on track
By Sandy Sims
Photos courtesy of National Aeronautics Space Association
While most Americans were watching the machinations of the presidential election on television last week, Los Gatans Denis and Jean McCloskey had their television tuned to Channel 34A, so they could watch the goings on in outer space. Astronauts Carlos Noriega (a graduate of Wilcox High in Santa Clara) and Joe Tanner, a friend of the McCloskeys, were floating in space, attaching powerful solar panels to the International Space Station orbiting high above the earth.
It's not surprising that Denis would feel a visceral connection to the live show on television. He was a longtime space science engineer who worked on the original design for those solar panels. He received the coveted Silver Snoopy Award from the astronauts and the Space Flight Awareness Award from NASA.
Jean, on the other hand, who received those same two awards, started her professional life as a San Jose Unified School District English teacher and a Los Gatos potter. She advanced from teaching high school students subject-verb agreement and commas to writing detailed contingency plans for the work that astronauts such as Noriega and Tanner do while floating in space, something she never imagined in her wildest dreams.
These days, space engineering jargon flows so freely off Jean's tongue that she has to stop often to translate. In fact, Jean helped create the management template for missions exactly like the one last week, when she and Denis worked on the National Aeronautics Space Association's (NASA) first service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.
And the Hubble project had some major hoops to jump before NASA could continue with the space station.
Decades of work and the dreams of the world's finest astronomers rode on the Hubble Space Telescope, as it rocketed into space in April 1990. Hubble's purpose was to spend 15 to 20 years probing the farthest and faintest reaches of the cosmos. By orbiting a powerful telescope outside of earth's murky atmosphere, professional stargazers hoped to find out if black holes really exist and if stars had their own planets. They hoped to analyze quasars and measure the expanding universe.
Down the road from Los Gatos in Monte Sereno, UC-Santa Cruz astronomer Dr. Sandy Faber, one of the designers of the wide-field camera installed on Hubble, told Omni magazine that she expected to find galaxies so far away and back in time that she could test her theories on how the galaxies formed.
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Denis and Jean McCloskey enjoy home life, now that they've retired from the exciting job of helping NASA service the Hubble Space Station.
NASA was counting on Hubble to restore a shine to its tarnished public image. NASA had suffered some serious setbacks, the horrific explosion of space shuttle Challenger and its crew in 1985 and other glitches, including the grounding of NASA's shuttle fleet because of fuel leaks.
Once the 12-plus-ton Hubble settled into its orbit 370 miles above earth, the world held its collective breath, awaiting the return of images from outer space.
In the meantime, Jean had left her teaching job because she says, "I was coming home from teaching teenagers to my own three teenagers, and yelling at them, and it wasn't good." She found a job at Lockheed Martin writing up new business proposals. "That was a hard job," Jean says, "because, after all that work putting proposals together, 50 percent of them are turned down." Still this was better for Jean than teaching.
Denis and Jean watched the Hubble progress on television just as the rest of the world, not knowing they would become deeply involved in salvaging the orbiting observatory's program.
Just a few weeks after Hubble's launch, NASA engineers, scientists and astronomers gasped.
Hubble's pictures were blurry.
After adjusting the mirrors this way and that, NASA realized this was serious. In time the scientists and engineers figured out that the telescope's primary mirror was defective. The edge of the 94.5-inch mirror--an 1800-pound ring--had been ground too flat by an amount equal to 1/50th the width of a human hair. This minuscule error rendered the $1.5 billion Hubble's images distorted.
It seems the primary mirror hadn't been tested properly before blasting it off into space.
Photo courtesy of National Aeronautics Space Association
Wearing underwater-pressurized suits similar to the suits worn in orbit, astronauts train in a 40-foot-deep underwater tank on a full-scale mock-up of Hubble.
Astronomers were deeply disappointed, some were furious. Newspapers printed a rash of Hubble cartoons. The big-as-a-bus space telescope was dubbed by some a myopic Cyclops, a blind eye in the sky. Hubble's defect only added more tarnish to NASA's image. Blame was hurled at everyone involved. Congress called for a review panel, and hovering over NASA was the question: Could the space program effectively handle launching big items into orbit? NASA's plans for building a space station were in jeopardy.
Those who worked on Hubble were embarrassed. Denis and Jean McCloskey felt the sting of public humiliation. Denis had worked on the space telescope project for many years. In 1978, he was in charge of space sciences at Lockheed, and helped write the proposal to NASA for spacecraft thermodynamics. He says, "most of us skulked around at Lockheed. We couldn't show our faces in the cafeteria."
Jean says, "When the gas station attendant saw my NASA Visa card, he asked if I had anything to do with Hubble. I told him no." The jokes and comments were everywhere. When Jean took her mother to mass at St. Mary's, she says, "Hubble was even nailed from the pulpit."
NASA had to figure out if Hubble's vision could be fixed.
"Hubble's optics are so contamination sensitive that bringing it back to earth was too risky," Denis says. Someone, he says, came up with the brilliant idea of sending up corrective mirrors ranging from the size of a dime to a quarter to correct for the spherical aberration, something akin to fitting contact lenses on the telescope. The new piece of equipment was called Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR).
"Hubble has a neat design," Denis says. "It's sort of modular so it can be worked on in orbit." He says, it is extravehicular activity (EVA) friendly, meaning space-walking astronauts can exchange and upgrade instruments easily. The photometer could be pulled out and COSTAR slid right in its place. However, astronauts wouldn't ferry COSTAR up to Hubble and install it till 1993.
To maintain the life of the orbiting observatory for 15 to 20 years, NASA had prescheduled future on-orbit service missions, the first one to take place in 1993.
Photo courtesy of National Aeronautics Space Association
Astronaut Steve Smith, a Stanford alumnus, who grew up in Almaden Valley, is working on the Hubble while it's orbiting in space.
In the meantime, Denis had transferred from Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale to Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., in 1990, to help set up a Lockheed facility and the framework for the first servicing mission. With one child in college in San Diego, one just graduated from high school and one still in high school, the couple set up housekeeping in Maryland.
However, Jean was stuck in California because she'd written the proposal for the first servicing mission for Hubble and was delayed, waiting for it to get all through the channels that even included Congress.
Being stuck here is probably what got Jean deeper into the Hubble program. The head man at Goddard said to Jean, "This is silly. You come back here and work, and you tell me what you want to do."
This question would ultimately mean Jean's life would belong to Hubble for the next 10 years. "I couldn't have done it if my kids hadn't been in college," Jean says.
Jean wound up creating and writing the management plan--who's going to do what--for service mission one (SM1). "This was a ground-up operation," Jean says, "because NASA hadn't done an on-orbit service mission before." A copy of the plan even went to Congress.
To write this plan, Jean says she climbed over every tiny part of the clean room where mock-ups of the parts of Hubble to be worked on were located. "I dressed up in one of those funny clean room space suits," she says, "and you can't wear makeup. But I have my standards," she says laughing, "I wore eyebrows." She got to know Goddard inside and out and everyone who worked there.
These columns of cool hydrogen gas and dust, located some 7,000 light years from Earth, are incubators for new stars.
Photo courtesy of National Aeronautics Space Association
While her husband managed the team that created the mission's hardware, Jean worked on contingency plans for things that could go wrong as the astronauts were changing out hardware.
"It's a good thing we worked separately," Jean says laughing. "It was better for the marriage."
Jean's group poured over each hardware interface the astronauts would make with Hubble, no matter how small, and figured out what could go wrong. They created contingency plans for each hardware interface.
"Nothing was left to chance," Jean says. "We tested, tested and retested. We assumed every interface with Hubble would fail and we made contingency plans," Jean says. A single interface could have several contingency plans. She adds, "But still there's always chance." Jean wrote up all contingency plans.
The service mission and contingency plans were tested in a large water tank, called a Natural Buoyancy Simulator (NBS) at Marshal Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. (Underwater most approximates the weightlessness of space.) Astronauts were trained, briefed, rebriefed and debriefed over and over. They went through the step by step EVA underwater many times.
When the shuttle, Endeavour, was finally launched, Denis says, "hundreds of people were biting their nails down to the nub."
During the mission, Jean was stationed in the payload operations control center, watching televised images of the mission and listening to every word the astronauts said as they performed their EVA. "Watching the EVA take place in space," Jean says, "is like watching an NBS without the bubbles."
She knew when the astronauts resorted to contingency plans. A lot had to be done on-orbit in just five days. First, the shuttle would have to grab Hubble with a robotic arm. The astronauts would then crawl out into space where they would replace Hubble's photometer with the COSTAR. They would install wide-field/planetary camera II and a new computer coprocessor and a number of other hardware components.
Photo courtesy of National Aeronautics Space Association
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., houses the largest clean room in the world, 1.3 million cubic feet. Astronauts use the precise mechanical and electrical simulators to practice installing Hubble hardware.
There was one hitch, and Jean knew first. When the astronauts went to replace the magnetometer, they found the outer box had disintegrated--a problem for which there was no contingency plan.
"I said, 'Oh sh--!' and my friend standing next to me asked if my mic was on." Jean says her kids can't understand why she took this job because "I'm not normally a calm person."
Jean notified systems engineering, which set up a tiger team to figure how to reconstruct the box with whatever was on board the shuttle. "You don't' want a tiger team, if possible," Jean says, "because that holds the crew up, which is why you try to plan every possible contingency." The tiger team found some extra multilayer insulation in the shuttle, and the crew reconstructed the box. That completed the work.
The first service mission was a success.
Then came the nail-biting wait for Hubble's new images from space.
This time Hubble returned sharp and beautiful pictures back to earth.
Astronomer's were elated and NASA's reputation was restored.
Now some 10 years since its launch into space, Hubble has traveled more than 1.425 billion miles, circling the earth every 90 minutes. The space telescope has taken well over 259,000 exposures and observed more than 13,000 astronomical targets.
Astronomers have confirmed the existence of black holes at the center of most galaxies, and seen the birth and death of stars and the first clear images of Pluto and its satellite Charon. Astronomers have learned that the universe is much younger and expanding faster than they thought. Astronomers have been able to look back in time to a younger universe.
Sandy Faber has a Hubble poster of the deepest picture of the universe ever taken. That picture allows astronomers to figure out how fast the most distant galaxies are moving.
The Hubble experiment has generated new technology on earth, as well. A device originally developed for Hubble can precisely locate a lump in a woman's breast, enabling the doctor to perform a simple needle biopsy instead of surgery. Computer-generated holograms that tested the mirrors used to correct Hubble's vision are now testing the precision of mirrors used to make microprocessor chips. And sensors used on Hubble may soon be used to prevent power outages.
Photo courtesy of National Aeronautics Space Association
This picture if a spiral-shaped galaxy 60 million light-years from Earth has helped astronomers to measure the rate of the universe's expansion and its age.
Denis and Jean worked on the next Hubble service mission in February 1997. Denis headed up the hardware team again, and by then Jean was in charge of the contingency team.
After working for Lockheed since 1963, Denis retired after the second mission, and the McCloskeys moved back to their Los Gatos home. Jean continued on as Hubble's contingency manager for service mission 3A in December 1999.
Jean says, "By the third service mission we knew what we were doing, and I could relax and enjoy the whole thing."
She also says Hubble takes your whole life. "You work unbelievable hours for three years. It's not a 40-hour week, especially when it's launch minus 12 months," she says.
After the McCloskey's move back to Los Gatos, Jean says the travel was grueling. She traveled to Houston, Annapolis and other places around the country. She stayed in Residence Inns everywhere and says they all look exactly alike. "In 1999, I put up signs for myself in the room: 'I'm in Houston' or 'I'm in Annapolis' because what I would be doing that day or week depended on where I was," she says.
"But, there's nothing like it," she says. "Who has closure the way we do? It could all go the other way," she says, "but it hasn't."
NASA plans more Hubble service missions, one of them early next year. The McCloskeys will tune into cable Channel 34A and watch the EVA from the comfort of their home. "I miss the people," Jean says, "but I don't miss the constant travel and the long hours."
Jean retired in June. She's been spending a lot of time with her 96-year-old mother, who lives at Our Lady of Fatima Villa in Saratoga, and the McCloskey's have been remodeling their home. But the English teacher in Jean is nudging her again. She's thinking of writing a mystery novel, and it just might include some space mission elements.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
