Mattias "Matt" Mountain, the new director of the
Space Telescope Science
Institute, appears to revel in the challenges and
opportunities that lie before him as he joins a nearly
25-year-old institution clearly in transition mode.
On Sept. 1, Mountain officially took over the helm of
STScI, the science operations center for NASA's
Hubble Space
Telescope and the planned James Webb Space Telescope.
The institute, located on San Martin Drive on the west side
of the Homewood campus, now enters a period where the
overachieving and still vibrant Hubble ambles to retirement
age and its successor moves closer to reality.
"It's an extraordinary privilege to now lead such a
fascinating and diverse organization as the Space Telescope
Science Institute," Mountain said. "I am ready to face the
challenges which lie ahead and am eager to strengthen the
institute's ongoing collaborations with Johns Hopkins
University."
Founded in 1981, the Space Telescope Science Institute
is operated by AURA — the Association of Universities
for Research in Astronomy — under contract to NASA.
STScI is housed in the Steven Muller Building, named after
the university's 10th president, who was instrumental in
bringing the institute to Maryland and the Homewood
campus.
Currently, the institute is home to planning,
scheduling and public outreach activities for the Hubble
Space Telescope. Data archive and distribution services for
Hubble and other missions are also provided by STScI.
In the future, the institute will operate and manage
the James Webb Space Telescope, a large infrared-optimized
space telescope scheduled for launch in August 2011. The
Webb Telescope is designed to study the earliest galaxies
and some of the first stars formed after the Big Bang
— objects that have a high redshift from Earth's
vantage point and need to be seen in infrared. The
telescope will reside in a halo or second Lagrange point
orbit, about one million miles from the Earth.
Before joining STScI, Mountain was director of the
Gemini Observatory that operates the two 8-meter Gemini
telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and in Cerro Pachon,
Chile. Mountain is also the telescope scientist for the
James Webb Space Telescope, a member of the JWST Science
Working Group and a visiting professor at the University of
Oxford.
In 1992, he became project scientist for the Gemini
8-meter Telescopes Project, based in Tucson, Ariz., and
went on to become the director of the project in 1994.
During his tenure as director, he had direct responsibility
for the construction and commissioning of the two Gemini
telescopes. In 1998, he moved to Hawaii and was responsible
for the Gemini Observatory, including formulating,
implementing and running the operations and development
programs of both Gemini 8-meter telescopes. As part of the
development program, he built up a world-renowned adaptive
optics group to keep the telescopes at the forefront of
observational infrared astronomy.
Mountain received his bachelor of science degree in
physics in 1978 and his doctorate in astronomy in 1983,
both from the Imperial College of Science and Technology,
London University.
Jonathan Bagger, chair of the university's
Physics and Astronomy
Department, said that the institute's search team found
an outstanding successor to Steven Beckwith, who had been
STScI director since 1998. More than 100 candidates were
considered for the director's position.
"[Matt] has a super reputation in astronomy, not only
as a scientist but as a manager and builder of telescope
facilities," Bagger said. "We look forward to continuing
Hopkins' connections with the institute and to
strengthening them going forward. One area where I hope we
can do even better is to make the connection more
transparent for graduate students. Plenty of our people
work there for thesis and research projects, but we can
probably make the process easier."
STScI and the Physics and Astronomy Department, in
fact, have a long history of collaboration and a strong
scientific relationship, Bagger said. Many JHU faculty use
the space telescope for their research, several STScI staff
have faculty appointments at Johns Hopkins, and the
Advanced Camera for Surveys, which was installed in the
Hubble Space Telescope in 2002, is run out of Physics and
Astronomy, with Hopkins faculty member Holland Ford serving
as its principal investigator.
Bagger said that another point of contact for
collaborations is the National Virtual Observatory project
— headed by Alex Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor
at Johns Hopkins — which will unite astronomical
databases of many earthbound and orbital observatories,
taking advantage of the latest computer technology and data
storage and analysis techniques. The goal of the project is
to maximize the potential for new scientific insights from
the data by making them available in an accessible form to
professional researchers, amateur astronomers and
students.
Mountain said that he foresees the institute and JHU
hosting joint seminars and fellowships.
Mountain's task of managing STScI's transition will
hold its challenges, Bagger said, especially in light of
questions about the Hubble's reservicing. Due to concerns
of astronaut safety in the wake of the Columbia shuttle
tragedy in 2003, a planned reservicing mission of Hubble
was canceled last year, one that would have included the
installation of six fresh gyros, six new batteries, a fine
guidance sensor and two advanced science instruments, the
Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and Wide-Field Camera 3. The
goals were to extend Hubble's science life by at least five
years and to bring critical new scientific capabilities to
the telescope.
If and when the Hubble telescope does get reserviced,
Mountain said that there is a vast amount of science and
discovery still ahead in terms of observations of galaxy
evolution, black holes and other objects in deep space.
"There are enormous discoveries ahead of us," Mountain
said.
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