HollywoodOn Productions: Janet Donovan & Brendan Kownacki
We’d like to thank the scientists at NASA for their assistance in tracking hurricane Harvey: “As Hurricane Harvey continued to strengthen, NASA analyzed the storm’s rainfall, cloud heights and cloud top temperatures. NASA’s GPM and Aqua satellite provided information while an animation of GOES-East satellite imagery showed Harvey’s progression toward the Texas coast.” Phys.org
While the administration battles over the importance of science, we took a look back at a few leading NASA scientists….fascinating!
This article was first published in April of 2015:
Hollywood on the Potomac was relieved to know that scientists Dr. Jeff Hester, NASA Scientist and Chief Engineer for Creating the Camera Hubble Telescope and Dr. Edward Weiler, NASA Chief Scientist for Hubble Telescope 1979-1998, did not spend their childhoods dissecting ants and frogs in their basements: Au contraire.
“For me personally, among my very earliest memories, it was watching them bolt astronauts into the Mercury capsules so I grew up fascinated with such things,” Dr. Hester told us. “I was always fascinated with flight and as a kid I had microscopes so I was engaged in that kind of stuff. I was probably ten years old and a friend of mine had bought a dime store telescope and had it set up in the back yard so I went over. He had it pointed at Saturn and it was so real, you could see the rings and it just floored me. Still to this day I can close my eyes and see Saturn sitting there in that little tiny telescope.”
Dr. Jeff Hester
Both were honored guests at the premiere of HUBBLE’s Cosmic Journey celebrating 25 Years of the Space Telescope hosted by National Geographic. The two friends and colleagues had not seen each other for 20 years. About the Mission: On April 24, 1990, the space shuttle Discovery lifted off from Earth with the Hubble Space Telescope nestled securely in its bay. The following day, Hubble was released into space, ready to peer into the vast unknown. Since then, Hubble has reinvigorated and reshaped our perception of the cosmos and uncovered a universe where almost anything seems possible within the laws of physics. Hubble has revealed properties of space and time that for most of human history were only probed in the imaginations of scientists and philosophers alike. Today, Hubble continues to provide views of cosmic wonders never before seen and is at the forefront of many new discoveries.
“At age 12 my dad gave me three or four dollars to send away for a little cardboard tube with a lens in it, and a little lens at the end, a little cheap telescope. Looked at the moon. Looked at Venus. I decided I needed something better, so I saved up my money and got a nice 2-inch telescope by age 12 1/2, 13,” Dr. Weiler told Hollywood on the Potomac. “Then I decided that I really liked this stuff and that I wanted to be an astronomer. I wanted to work for NASA someday, and I wanted to go to Northwestern University. I also built a 6-inch mirror and a huge telescope by the time I was 13, and all of those goals were met. I came from a blue-collar family, so I’m self taught by reading books from the library until I wound up in college, then I wasn’t self-taught.”
Dr. Edward Weiler
Dispelling the notion that scientists are a little more inward – a bit odd so to speak – Weiler informed us that it isn’t the case. “I joined a fraternity at Northwestern. I was the captain of my baseball team. I played a lot of sports. Won the badminton champion of the university that year, which can be an aggressive sport. It’s not your backyard sport if you play it right. Anyway, no, I was fairly outgoing. I had a good social life. People thought it was neat that I was working on space stuff.”
“Scientists get their persona, largely undeserved persona – okay, maybe not undeserved persona – because they’re used to having to go through the rigorous process of asking nature is this the right answer, or not, and accepting the answer that they get, and that takes a different kind of discipline,” said Dr. Hester. “That takes a different kind of relating to the world, and that does tend to fold over into how you relate to other people. God knows, scientists tend to be passionate. The idea that scientists are dispassionate is complete craziness. If you’re passionate about it, then in your interactions with other people, the fact that you were passionate about something that they don’t get is going to show up.”
“Yes, I am a rocket scientist.”
