October 1983
From The Space Library
Kurt Debus, who helped develop Germany's World War II V-2 rocket and worked on the Redstone ballistic missile for the U.S. Army in the 1950s, died after a heart attack at his home near Cocoa, Fla., at the age of 74.
He had joined Wernher von Braun's rocket team on the Baltic coast during the war and came to the United States afterwards. Von Braun said of him: "We develop the rockets and it's up to Debus to see they do what they're supposed to do." In 1952, Debus became director of what would later be NASA's Kennedy Space Center; his last official act before retirement was to break ground for a KSC landing strip for Shuttles returning from orbit. (W Post, Oct 11/83, B-6)
MFSC said that the Space Telescope, NASA's future optical orbiting astronomical observatory, had been named the Edwin P. Hubble Space Telescope to honor a foremost U.S. astronomer who had died in 1953.
Scientists had differed on the extent and dimensions of the universe: Earth's solar system was considered part of a larger system of all stars visible to the naked eye. It was not known whether faint spiral nebulae were part of the Milky Way or distant universes, each composed of myriad stars.
Hubble, working with the 100-inch telescope at Mt. Wilson, Calif., looked at individual stars in the Andromeda nebula and by the end of 1924 was able to show that Andromeda was many times farther away than any star in the Milky Way system. He later showed that the universe was expanding (evidence of the Big Bang theory), that external galaxies were moving away from earth, and that the more remote the galaxy the faster it was moving. This was called Hubble's Law; the coefficient relating distance and velocity of the galaxy was called Hubble's Constant.
The newly named Space Telescope was scheduled for launch from the Space Shuttle in 1986. (MSFC Release 83-70)
- September
- October
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
