On April 9, 2001, at the 17th National Space Symposium’s Opening Ceremony, the Hubble Space Telescope Team will receive the 2001 Space Foundation Achievement Award in honor of eleven years of unprecedented discoveries and operations.

The symposium takes place April 9-12, 2001 in Colorado Springs, Colo. and gathers in one place space leaders from industry, military and government. This award is among the highest honors the Space Foundation bestows. As the recipient, the Hubble Team will be recognized for their outstanding achievements in space.

Accepting the award on behalf of NASA and the Hubble Team will be Dr. John Campbell, the Director of Flight Programs and Projects at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., “It’s hard to believe that it was more than a decade ago that a spectacular launch on the morning of April 24, 1990, ushered in a golden age of astronomy. Hubble has earned a place as one of the wonders of the modern world. It is, I believe, a national resource, and so too is the Hubble Team.”

The Hubble Team is a collaboration between industry and government. The Team includes people from NASA, European Space Agency, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and other NASA Centers, including Goddard, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, Kennedy Space Center, Fla.; Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.; and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Industry partners include Lockheed Martin, Bethesda, Md.; Ball Corporation, Boulder, Colo.; Orbital Science Corporation, Dulles, Va; Jackson and Tull, Seabrook, Md.; B.F. Goodrich, Danbury, Conn.; Swales Aerospace, Beltsville, Md.; Honeywell, Columbia, Md.; and Computer Sciences Corporation, Laurel, Md.

In the relatively short period of time since Hubble’s launch in 1990, the telescope has a gathered a remarkable list of achievements. Hubble has seen further and more clearly than any other visible light telescope before it and has accurately pinned down the size, expansion rate and the age of the universe. Breath-taking images and discoveries of black holes, colliding galaxies and bizarre objects at the edge of the universe reported by newspapers, magazines, broadcasters and the Internet has sparked a love and fascination of science and exploration by millions of people world-wide.

Hubble was conceived to tackle scientific goals that could be accomplished only by an observatory in space. Its mission is to spend 20 years probing the farthest and faintest regions of the cosmos. Crucial to fulfilling this objective is series of on-orbit servicing missions. With each servicing mission, Hubble becomes more powerful than it was when it was first launched. Each new instrument installed or repair performed increases Hubble’s productivity and longevity. Future servicing missions to Hubble are planned for later this year and 2003. Hubble will be decommissioned in 2010.

For more information on The Space Foundation, visit their website at:

http://www.ussf.org/index.shtml