NASA Awards Hubble History Contract

Feb. 10, 2015 - PRLog -- NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, has awarded Foresight Science & Technology Inc. a contract to gather archival materials and to produce a scholarly history of the post-launch era of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Project. This project will complement previous historical work from the pre-launch era.

The Foresight team is being led by Dr. Christopher Gainor, a historian of technology and a writer specializing in space exploration and aeronautics. He is the author of four books, including Arrows to the Moon, which covered the Canadian contribution to the Apollo moon landings. He holds a PhD in the history of technology from the University of Alberta, where his faculty advisor was Dr. Robert W. Smith, the author of the previous scholarly history of the development of the Hubble Telescope up to initial launch. Dr. Gainor considers “HST to be unique as a robotic spacecraft that has been in continuous operation for nearly a quarter century and that has been in the public eye for most of that time.”

The Foresight team (which also includes John D. Ruley and Arendt Speser) will collect documents and oral histories, creating an accessible archive to support and complement the scholarly history. The research will pick up the story in early 1990, when the shuttle Discovery carried HST into orbit.  It will document all five servicing missions and the processes that were used to make mission management decisions throughout its operational history, which have led to HST being the premier astronomical telescope in space for a quarter of a century.

The material collected will be placed in an archival collection with an innovative electronic catalog for use by the historical research team and then delivered to NASA for subsequent use by the government and other historical researchers.

For information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov (http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html)

Additional information on HST can be found at:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble

About Foresight

Foresight Science & Technology, Inc. is a global company offering market intelligence, technology analysis, licensing and deal-making, intellectual property management, policy development, program evaluation, training, consulting, and other services related to the movement of innovations from conception to market.  Offices are in Boston, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon; Oxford, UK; Singapore and Santiago Chile.