IAA Lecture - More about Hubble, and much more!

The IAA lecture on Weds 17th September featured Dr Bob Fosbury of the European Space Agency who delivered a gripping lecture entitled entitled "Astronomy today and the role played by the Hubble Space Telescope"


Dr Fosbury is head of the section in the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of ESA's collaboration with NASA on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) project at ST-ECF. Based at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) near Munich in Germany, Fosbury joined this initiative in 1985, more than 5 years before launch. During the latter part of this period, Bob served on NASA's Ad Hoc Science Working Group and ESA's Study Science Team as they developed the instrument concepts for the James Webb Space Telescope, the next generation space observatory.

Dr Fosbury covered the achievements of Hubble, explained a lot about ground based projects in Chile, the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope as well as the October mission to upgrade Hubble to give us at least another five years astronomy.

Here's a still frame from the NASA simulation video for that mission...



And here's Dr Fosbury taking questions...



This was an excellent lecture and again, the IAA Council are to be congratulated for putting together such a complete programme of talks and events.

It really is light-years ahead of the other Astronomy group in Northern Ireland which has resorted to changing its name in a laughable attempt to disguise their tarnished reputation.