The STScI Newsletter provides articles of interest to the general astronomical community; presents updates on the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, and other initiatives; and announces relevant meetings and conferences.
The items below represent all volumes, issues, and articles within past and current newsletters. You may use the filter bar to search by specific criteria including relevant missions, volumes and the issues within them, and/or keywords.
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By the time this article is published, the JWST Cycle 1 deadline will have passed. This milestone has been a long time in the making, and it is incredibly exciting to see the community crafting their proposals and using the many proposal planning tools.
In its 30th year of operation, Hubble Space Telescope science operations have achieved "new normal" levels, both amid remote work under pandemic conditions, as well as dealing with the unpredictable (but not pathological) behavior of Hubble's quirkiest gyroscope.
To significantly further advance our knowledge of galaxy formation and evolution in the future, we need to expand our observations to exploit wide-field capabilities beyond Hubble's relatively narrow sky coverage.
Due to COVID-19, this was the second remote STUC meeting. Presentations were made available ahead of time in order to focus meeting time on questions and discussion.
Our understanding of the Hubble constant has been refined by successive generations, while often teaching us something new about the Universe.
One of the key questions regarding the cosmic reionization process is: what is the role of dwarf galaxies in cosmic reionization? Until very recently, there was no consensus on whether the main contributors were faint, star-forming dwarf galaxies or active galactic nuclei.
The good news is that Science Operations has been supporting HST at STScI for over 30 years, contributing significantly over the decades to HST's remarkable success. The really good news is that we will be doing similar (but subtly different) support functions for JWST soon after launch.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has only a short 5–10 years to observe our Universe and assist us as we work to unravel its mysteries. We have a responsibility to extract as much science as possible from every moment of JWST's active mission.
JWST recently passed a milestone event in its path to launch and eventual arrival at L2, where it will usher in the next phase of humankind's exploration of the cosmos. That event was the successful completion of Ground Segment-3.
NASA developed the concept of the "Great Observatories"—a multi-wavelength fleet of space telescopes operating simultaneously—throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Two of the four (Hubble and Chandra) continue on today.
Current astronomical facilities (including Hubble) allow us to probe the atmospheres of exoplanets. Future facilities, such as JWST, will give us such capabilities for many more planets in even more detail.
Space Telescope Science Institute has been on a journey to modernize and automate business services across the Enterprise. The IT Services Division has been leading the charge, utilizing technology platforms and solutions such as Box, Confluence, Jira, and ServiceNow.
HST flux standards use a model atmosphere to establish the relative flux vs. wavelength, which is then normalized to the absolute flux level of the few reliable absolute measures, such as the stars Vega at a visible wavelength and Sirius at infrared wavelengths.
In this article, we present the new calibrations of the WFC3 UVIS and IR detectors and the ACS detectors, available for all MAST calibrated data products starting October 15, 2020.
Our 2020 STScI Symposium, "The Local Group: Assembly and Evolution," was held on August 31–September 4, 2020. This was the first time an STScI conference was organized in a fully virtual format.
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