The Hubble: a mission of discovery

Launch will give Rice astronomer his brightest career moment

Since its inception nearly two decades ago, Rice University astronomer Robert O'Dell has followed the Hubble Space Telescope through its many ups and downs.

The ultimate "up" is just ahead.

NASA plans to launch the $1.55 billion space telescope aboard the shuttle Discovery early Tuesday.

"This is the biggest single thing in my professional life," said O'Dell, who became NASA's first chief Hubble program scientist in 1972, only to leave the post a decade later with the space telescope still years from launch.

Across the country, there are dozens like him, engineers as well as scientists, who have staked a major part of their careers on the success of the powerful orbiting observatory.

In O'Dell's case, an association with NASA began in 1967. The space agency had suffered a serious setback in its historic race to the moon during January of that year, when three astronauts died in a fire aboard their Apollo capsule during a launch pad test.

At that point the 30-year-old director of the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory, O'Dell became an adviser to the space agency.

Four years later, his experience with the construction of ground-based telescopes was sought by NASA for a more focused purpose, a program then known as the Large Space Telescope Project.

By mid-1972, the space agency was finishing a feasibility study that concluded what visionaries had dreamed of a half century earlier: The Space Age would make it possible to place an observatory high above the bright city lights and the distortions of the Earth's atmosphere.

O'Dell left his full professorship at the Chicago school and signed on as the space telescope program's chief scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where the Hubble program was to be managed.

By mid-1981, NASA's space shuttle was finally aloft, and the space telescope was targeted for a 1983 launch.

As the original launch date approached, O'Dell elected to re-enter academia and pursue his research interests, which included using the telescope, rather than to continue building a career as a government scientist.

He worked out an agreement with Rice University and NASA that would allow him to leave Marshall but continue to carry out his duties as the telescope's chief program scientist from Houston.

By late 1983, however, it was clear that the observatory would not be launched until late 1986. Delays had befallen the shuttle program and changes were occurring in the structure of the space telescope program within NASA.

By the early 1980s, the program had been renamed for the American astronomer Edwin Hubble. His observations that the universe is expanding became the basis of the Big Bang theory: a massive explosion led to the formation of the universe.

Those changes meant that the space agency needed a chief scientist in residence at Marshall. O'Dell declined an offer to return to NASA full time but did not sever his research ties to the space telescope.

The separation turned out to be a wise one for O'Dell.

The fatal Challenger accident on Jan. 28, 1986, again grounded the space telescope. The launch slipped to late 1989 and eventually to April of this year.

As discouraging as the shuttle disaster was, O'Dell believes the space agency used the recovery period wisely, improving both the powers and life span of the space telescope.

But, it also held some disappointment. In Challenger's aftermath, the space agency stopped taking civilians into space.

Though that policy has been reversed for at least one approaching mission, O'Dell's chance to accompany the Hubble into orbit as a "payload specialist" was dashed.

But, as the leader of one of seven teams of scientists who will get first crack at the use of the telescope, his ties and Rice's ties to the Hubble remain strong.

His team will search for confirmation that Jupiter-sized planets may circle any of about 80 nearby stars, and attempt to further explain the role distant quasars played in the evolution of the galaxies.