June 2022 Meeting Notes

Bartlesville Astronomical Society Meeting Minutes

June 6, 2022

• Opening and Welcome

• Thank you to Denise Gregg for Zoom setup

• 24 in attendance this evening, including 13 visitors! Most of our visitors this evening were people we met at Sunfest! Two were colleagues of Gary Nealis’ from NASA who attended via Zoom.

• Announcements

• Library display

• Thanks to everyone, including Denise, John Blaesi, Martha, Bob, Evan and Craig who volunteered their time for setup and takedown.

• We have received lots of positive comments from the library, and from people who visited our booth at Sunfest.

• Sunfest

• Thanks to all who participated in our 3-day event!

• We estimate that we had about 300 visitors to our booth!

• Star Party - Saturday June 11 at Jo Allyn Lowe

• Gary Nealis is making presentations of his days at NASA mission control.

• Sundays at 10:00 at Bambino’s

• Tonight’s Program

• “Hubble Space Telescope Deploy and Repair Missions” - Gary Nealis

• Gary worked for NASA as an engineer in tracking communications from 1973-1981. He worked in the MER, Mission Evaluation Room.

• Gary made a very comprehensive presentation on the Hubble Space Telescope, its launch, initial testing in space—the primary mirror turned out to be flawed—and initial repair missions.

• The Hubble Space Telescope has a 94-inch primary mirror, a 13-inch secondary mirror, and a fine guidance sensor. The Hubble is 43 ½ feet long and 14 feet in diameter (the Space Shuttle payload bay is 15 feet in diameter!). The Hubble is the size of a railroad tank car. Many of the Hubble’s components were designed in a modular fashion so they could be replaced later—which turned out to be very fore-sighted. The Hubble is a Ritchey–Chrétien-type telescope. The Hubble was designed to be able to withstand the extremes in temperature that it would encounter in space.

• The Space Shuttle mission STS-31, using the Discovery orbiter, launched April 24,1990 and deployed the Hubble. This mission reached the highest Space Shuttle orbit to that date, 600 km; the re-entry burn was also the longest to that date—4 minutes and 58 seconds.

• The high-speed photometer on the Hubble helped NASA to diagnose the problem with its primary mirror.

• It took 2 ½ years to design a fix for it; it was replaced by COSTAR (Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement) on the STS-61 mission in December 1993. A preliminary pre-repair mission took place on STS-51 in September 1993.

• The Hubble’s fine guidance sensor can search for wobbles, such as in rotating binary stars.

• Gary wrote a paper on using the Hubble’s fine guidance system to search for extra-solar planets for NASA’s first Hubble Space Telescope class in the fall of 1981.

• Observing and Imaging Reports

• Lunar eclipse - May 15. We observed that this eclipse was indeed darker and redder than most eclipses, as had been predicted, due to the underwater volcanic eruption offshore Tonga four month’s prior.

• Woolaroc would like a star party—this fall?

• Business

• Minutes of previous meeting are posted online by Denise Gregg were approved

• Treasurer’s Report - Evan Zorn

• Ending April balance: $10,334.21

• Dues Payments from PayPal: $48.24

• Amazon Smile quarterly donation: $5.00

• One expense: Hideaway Pizza for library setup volunteers: -$28.05

• Ending balance May 31: $10,359.40.

• Committee Reports

• Astronomical League news and activities - Denise Gregg

• MSRAL - June 3-5 - St. Louis, MO

• ALCon - July 28-30 - Albuquerque, NM

• Youth club (BYA) news - Rick Bryant—Rick was not in attendance this evening.

• Library Display was taken down May 28. The exhibit was very well-received and several people asked to get on our newsletter as a result of the library display.

• FCC - Evan Zorn. Craig said that several people on the City Council liked our library display, which might serve to help us keep our storage area at the FCC.

• Adjournment

• Next meeting - Thursday, July 7 at library

• Ice cream at Braum’s!!!

• Motion to adjourn