That was cool, helpful and fun! I just finished the interview. I interviewed Andrew Bundas, an astrophysicist that works at the Jennifer Chalsty planetarium at the Liberty Science Center. Andrew graduated from Michigan State University with a major in astrophysics.  After college Andrew got his first job at a small Planetarium at Michigan State. Two years later, he got a job at the brand new Planetarium at the Liberty Science Center, which is the biggest Planetarium in the Western Hemisphere (and the 5th largest planetarium in the world).    

After my site visit to the planetarium and the science center, Andrew took us into a business conference room for our interview.  The interview went really well. That may be because I sent Andrew my interview questions before we met so that he could prepare. Before he even started to answer my questions he told me how great he thought my questions were and how it took him a while to prepare and think about answers.  

Of all the amazing and great information Andrew gave me, I was excited to find out that Andrew, a professional astrophysicist, agreed with me that the most vital technology to the study of planetary science is the telescope. I was a little surprised that a professional agreed with my point of view!  Andrew explained that although rovers and probes can be a really useful technology for exploring the details of a planet, the telescope can see across the solar system and universe and into the cosmos, giving us a wider view and much more information. That extended my view of the different space technologies and what they do.  Rovers and probes can’t go beyond the outer planets of our solar system. Telescopes have been helping scientists since the 1600s. In all of human history, the telescope has been the thing that has allowed mankind to see more beyond anything else for astronomy as a whole.

Andrew compared what we can see with our eyes versus what we can see with telescopes.  He explained to me, in perfect locations with no lights around you can see about 5,000 stars, you can see the milky way pretty well and you can see the Andromeda galaxy (the closest galaxy to us).  Until about 1920 we thought the milky way was the only galaxy that existed and we thought Andromeda was part of the milky way. So with our eyes alone, we are limited to 20,000 stars and maybe 3-4 galaxies. With telescopes, we can see millions of stars and millions of galaxies.  It is exponential what telescopes can allow us to see. I knew telescopes helped us see more than our eyes alone, but I couldn’t believe how much more we could see with telescopes! We have found 4,000 other planets using telescopes. That’s so much! We have only actually seen a bit of what is really out there in the universe. We have found less than 100,000,000 galaxies. Not even half (or even a quarter).  As we get newer and better telescopes we will see even more.

Also, Andrew gave me a lot of information on my focus, the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble was built by private engineering companies here in the US.  The companies worked together to build this big telescope. It was a huge engineering achievement. It was the most impressive feat of engineering in the 1980s and 1990s.  In 1990, they sent it up into space and took the first pictures and they realized something was wrong. The mirrors weren’t polished properly and it was off by a tiny bit. But a tiny bit can do a lot of harm.  They have had to send astronauts up to the telescope (250 miles above the Earth) to work on it five different times. The missions were to fix cameras, fix mirrors, and fix wheels that point and track. Even with all these fixes that were needed, it is still the most useful astronomy tool anyone has ever been built.  

Next, I spoke to Andrew about Hubble’s discoveries and how they have helped us understand the universe.  Andrew said, the reason why Hubble is so great, isn’t because its big. There are bigger telescopes on Earth. The reason it is so good is it’s in space.  I didn’t know that the Earth’s atmosphere messes with how we see things.  By putting the telescope up into space it allows us to see a lot further than we were ever able to see before.  Because it was outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, Hubble taught us a lot about different galaxies that we were not able to study from telescopes on Earth. Astrophysicists, like Andrew, could now better understand how the universe was built.  First, we didn’t know there were other galaxies, then we thought maybe there were 100,000 galaxies. Now we know there are 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. Hubble helped us understand that the universe is getting bigger and these galaxies are slowly expanding away from each other.  

Hubble is Andrew’s favorite thing that astronomers ever built.  Before Hubble everything was fuzzy. Hubble was able for the first time able to get clear and brilliant pictures.  These pictures inspire students to want to study astrophysics and astronomy. It makes people excited about astronomy because we can now see what is out there.

The next thing I asked Andrew about was Hubble’s retirement and the launch of the new telescope called the James Webb telescope.  Andrew said that the James Webb telescope is one of the most interesting things happening in astronomy today.  It is the most ambitious telescope we have ever tried to build. It is so big, it’s got like 50x the area of the telescope compared to Hubble.  It a bunch of gold plated octagons attached together to make a big mirror. It is a really hard engineering challenge. It was originally supposed to launch in 2016, which it didn’t.  Part of the sun shield, the part that shields or protects the telescope from the sun, ripped during testing.  They fixed the tear and now the James Webb is undergoing more testing.  Scientists are now planning on a March 2021 launch. They need everything to go perfectly with this launch. With Hubble, they were able to send 5 missions of astronauts up to service things when they went wrong.   James Webb will be about 1 million miles away, so we won’t be able to send astronauts to fix it if something goes wrong. It won’t even be orbiting the Earth like Hubble. It will be further away than the moon. It will be orbiting the sun. James Webb needs to be far away from the Earth because the Earth is hot and bright. The heat and light from the Earth would interfere with James Webb is trying to study. Since it is going to be so far away, once it is launched, it has to go perfectly.  Otherwise, “it is just an expensive chunk of metal floating in space.”

We also talked about other technology, like space probes and space rover technology and what we have learned from those technologies.  Andrew said that when comparing telescopes versus rovers or probes, he can’t say one is better than the other, he says they are different. Telescopes are great at studying things far away. They are useful for studying planets too, but they are better at studying things far away. Probes and rovers can’t get very far outside the solar system.  So probes and rovers are great at studying planets within our solar system. 

Finally, I asked Andrew about the future of planetary science and technology.  Will the technology we have today be useful to people in the future?  Andrew explained that the way astronomers have always worked is they have built off each other. The earliest telescopes were built in the 1600s.  We don’t use those telescopes today, but we use what they learned to build new telescopes and then built on those and so on. So will humans in 100-years use Hubble….probably not, but they will use what we learned by building it.  It is like a ladder. We go up one step at a time.

And there you have it….a detailed summary of my awesome interview with Andrew Bundas of the Jennifer Chalsty Planetarium.  This will definitely help me answer my main inquiry question!  Until next blog…