About this Article

The Space Telescope Users Committee (STUC) met in person on June 2 and 3, 2025. At this meeting, we welcomed a new chair, Ata Sarajedini (Florida Atlantic University) and three new members: Sarah Casewell (University of Leicester), Pippa Molyneux (Southwest Research Institute), and Kate Whitaker (University of Massachusetts at Amherst), while three members completed their term on the committee: Misty Bentz (Georgia State University), Saurabh Jha (Rutgers University), and Ian Roederer (North Carolina State University). We are grateful for their contributions.

This article is a summary of the meeting. We encourage the community to view the complete set of presentation slides on the STScI website. The STUC has written a full report with recommendations based on the information presented.

The proposed budget cuts to NASA, whose missions have contributed significantly to the advancement of science, are of serious concern to the STUC. Please see below for suggestions about community advocacy.

Still Going Strong

The Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 35th anniversary in peak performance. Hubble science publications hit a new record of 1,073 peer-reviewed journal articles in 2024, once more showing the long-lasting power of this facility. Hubble complements the fleet of space telescopes by uniquely providing access to the UV, as well as long-term continuous operations that open a new parameter space for decades-long-baseline time-domain discoveries.

Hubble operations are at a high level of stability, having recovered from past anomalies and the transition to Reduced Gyro Mode. No recent anomalies have been recorded in the past several months. Despite the challenges of a reduced field of regard, the scheduling efficiency is currently maximized for Reduced Gyro Mode. All instruments are operating nominally and actions are being taken to ensure their longevity. The projections for the future reliability of Hubble remain very high well into the 2030s. Furthermore, redundancy on the Science Instrument Command and Data Handler was restored, contributing to the telescope’s longevity.

The development of the Hubble Advanced Spectral Products (HASP) has been completed and there is steady progress on the Hubble Spectroscopic Legacy Archive (HSLA) with the goal of being completed by the end of 2025. New initiatives in the Office of Public Outreach include impressive new visualizations of Hubble data.

Community Advocacy

The STUC was presented with an outline of the President’s NASA budget proposal to Congress. If not modified by Congress, this proposed budget would mean catastrophic reductions to the overall NASA budget allocation. These reductions would doubtless produce adverse effects on the NASA Astrophysics research budget as well as its space missions such as HST and JWST. In light of this dire possibility, we encourage the U.S. community to get involved in helping advocate for NASA astrophysics and science. While this advocacy can and should showcase many of Hubble’s strengths and its high productivity, we recommend that the community to center their advocacy messages on strong federal support for NASA science as a whole.

Feedback

The STUC is formally charged with advising NASA and STScI on all aspects of observatory operations. We encourage community members to provide feedback to the committee and STScI. Comments to the STUC chair can be made via the link on the STUC webpage.

Service on the Space Telescope Users Committee

Would you like to serve on the STUC? Nominations for STUC membership can be submitted at any time by email to stuc-nominations@stsci.edu. Self-nominations are welcome but not required. Submissions are encouraged, but not required, to include a brief cover letter and curriculum vitae summarizing the nominee’s relevant background and HST-related interests. While members must be affiliated with institutions in the U.S. or in ESA countries, there is no restriction on citizenship. Nominations will be considered on a rolling basis, as several members rotate off after every meeting, approximately every 6 months.