"So astronomy was my first love among the scientific disciplines, and I will always be proud of having contributed in a small way to the Hubble Space Telescope project in the early 1980s. In fact, it is my deep appreciation of the importance of Hubble and all of the other great observatories, Chandra and Spitzer, to science and society that prompted my decision that NASA will, if at all possible, use one of the remaining flights of the Space Shuttle for Hubble servicing. Thanks, we still need to figure out if that's possible. And we still have one more test flight in our return to flight series to know what we've got in the way of a flying machine, but I am hopeful. But whatever the future may bring in this regard, we are very fortunate that Hubble has successfully operated for 15 years now, and along with two of its fellow NASA Great Observatories, those I just mentioned - Spitzer and Chandra - continues to make discoveries of fundamental scientific importance. Some of those discoveries are being highlighted at this conference in a display I just toured through, including the release of a multi-filter mosaic of the Orion Nebula, made with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys [here I am PI]; Hubble's imaging for the first time of the close companion star to Polaris; the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope's imaging of a remarkable nest of red super giant stars - 14 supernovas in the making [here I am Co-I. PI is Don Figer... great job Don!]- and the Chandra XRay Observatory's investigation of the affects of giant black holes and hot gasses in elliptical galaxies."
Question: how could those Polaris and Chandra guys do so well without me?
