This is the third in a three-part series.

After observing time is awarded, the Institute creates a long-range plan. This plan ensures that the diverse collection of observations are scheduled as efficiently as possible. This task is complicated because the telescope cannot be pointed too close to bright objects like the Sun, the Moon, and the sunlit side of Earth. Adding to the difficulty, most astronomical targets can only be seen during certain months of the year; some instruments cannot operate in the high space-radiation areas of Hubble ’s orbit; and the instruments regularly need to be calibrated. These diverse constraints on observations make telescope scheduling a complex optimization problem that Institute staff are continually solving, revising, and improving.”

Preparing for an observation also involves selecting guide stars to stabilize.the telescope’s pointing and center the target in the instrument’s field of view. The selection is done automatically by the Institute’s computers, which choose two stars per pointing from a catalog of almost a billion stars. These guide stars will be precisely positioned within the telescope’s fine guidance sensors, ensuring that the target region and orientation of the sky is observed by the desired instrument.”]

A weekly, short-term schedule is created from the long-range plan. This schedule is translated into detailed instructions for both the telescope and its instruments to perform the observations and calibrations for the week. From this information, daily command loads are then sent from the Institute to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to be uplinked to Hubble.

Hubble’s Flight Operations Team resides in the Space Telescope Operations Control Center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. In addition to monitoring the health and safety of the telescope, they also send command loads to the spacecraft, monitor their execution, and arrange for transmission of science and engineering data to the ground.

The journey from proposal through selection and scheduling culminates in the email informing astronomers that their data is ready to be accessed. Usually, the process takes more than a year from idea to data—sometimes even longer. Of course, that’s when the real work begins—the analysis of the data and the hard work of uncovering another breakthrough Hubble discovery!