- published: 14 Jan 2015
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The Space Telescope Science Institute (STSCI) is the science operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope and for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST; scheduled to be launched in 2018). STSCI is located on the Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus in Baltimore, Maryland and was established in 1981 as a community-based science center that is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA). Today, in addition to performing continuing science operations of HST and preparing for scientific exploration with JWST, STScI manages and operates the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), the Data Management Center for the Kepler mission and a number of other activities benefiting from its expertise in and infrastructure for supporting the operations of space-based astronomical observatories. Most of the funding for STScI activities comes from contracts with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center but there are smaller activities funded by NASA's Ames Research Center, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the European Space Agency (ESA). The staff at STScI consists of scientists (mostly astronomers and astrophysicists), software engineers, data management and telescope operations personnel, education and public outreach experts, and administrative and business support personnel. There are approximately 100 Ph.D. scientists working at STScI, 15 of which are ESA staff who are on assignment to the HST project. The total STScI staff consists of about 450 people.
A space observatory is any instrument (such as a telescope) in outer space that is used for observation of distant planets, galaxies and other outer space objects. The first such space observatory was the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990. Space observatories avoid many of the problems of ground observatories, such as light pollution and the filtering and distortion of electromagnetic radiation (scintillation).
This category is distinct from other observatories located in space that are pointed toward Earth for the purpose of reconnaissance and other types of information gathering.
In 1946, American theoretical astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer was the first to conceive the idea of a telescope in outer space, a decade before the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik 1.
Spitzer's proposal called for a large telescope that would not be hindered by Earth's atmosphere. After lobbying in the 1960s and 70s for such a system to be built, Spitzer's vision ultimately materialized into the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched on April 24, 1990 by the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-31).