Margon off to oversee Next Generation Space Telescope

By Vince Stricherz
News & Information

Bruce Margon, an astronomy professor, two-time chairman of the department and the 2000 Faculty Lecturer, is leaving the UW for a key post overseeing the Hubble Space Telescope and developing the Next Generation Space Telescope.

Bruce Margon is known for teaching as well as research. Here, he demonstrates the action of a pulsar for an introductory class using a miner’s hat and a swivel chair.

On March 26, Margon begins his new position as associate director for science at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He has been on leave from the UW since last summer, working at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., analyzing data from Hubble and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. His UW leave has been extended through June 2002.

“The option is there that I might return to Seattle,” he said, “but the position is intended by the institute as a permanent one.”

Astronomy chairman Craig Hogan said the move is a natural progression for Margon, putting him permanently in a major national job after years of prominent national advisory roles as a UW faculty member.

“Bruce spent a lot of years fundamentally shaping the way the department is. He brought it up to the next-highest level, and it’s now one of the leading departments in the nation,” Hogan said. “He’s helped make the UW one of the leading users of the Hubble telescope.”

Margon will supervise about 140 people, including all of the scientists and about 40 staff members involved in public outreach for all space projects for the Hubble Space Telescope and for NASA’s Origins Program. He also will oversee the institute’s division that evaluates and selects proposals from scientists on what to observe using Hubble.

“My own personal history with Hubble goes back almost a quarter-century, when I was selected as a member of the original group of astronomers who designed and built the first set of light-sensing instruments for the telescope,” Margon said. “I was also a member of the original group of scientists who authored a report that is generally regarded as the conception of the Next Generation Space Telescope.”

The institute is a research institute founded 20 years ago and housed at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, though it is not affiliated with the university. It is operated under a NASA contract by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), a nonprofit consortium that includes the UW. Margon chaired AURA’s board of directors for three years ending in 1998 and was instrumental in hiring the space telescope institute’s current director, Steven Beckwith, who has now hired Margon.

“We are fortunate to attract such a high-level senior scientist to the institute,” Beckwith said in a staff memorandum. “Bruce brings an abundance of talent and a wealth of experience to us that would be difficult to find in any other individual.”

The institute’s original mission was to operate the science program of the Hubble Space Telescope. It runs the annual competition to select projects and allocate the telescope’s observing time. The institute receives, processes, archives and distributes all the complex raw data gathered from Hubble, and plans the daily activities of the spacecraft.

The institute also will operate Hubble’s successor, the Next Generation Space Telescope, a massive instrument to be launched into deep space in 2009, and will be NASA’s partner in designing the new telescope during the next decade. Hubble is expected to operate until about 2010, which means there will be some overlap between the two space-based telescopes.

In addition, the institute maintains and distributes various other large digital astronomical databases and recently took on maintenance and distribution of the 12 terabyte public version of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The sky survey uses a special telescope, based at Apache Point, N.M., and is in the process of mapping the universe visible from the Northern Hemisphere out to 1 billion light years from Earth. Margon is a previous scientific director of the Sloan program, and the UW will continue its involvement in the project.

Margon has written more than 170 research papers for professional journals, and is a frequent contributor to the popular press. In 1981, he received the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society, presented to an individual for outstanding achievement in observational astronomical research. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society.

Margon earned a doctorate in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley, and held positions there and at University of California, Los Angeles, before joining the University of Washington faculty in 1980. In two separate stints, he chaired the UW Astronomy Department a total of 11 years.