PAST NEWS

Feb. 8, 2006

- Paper "Discovery of an Extraordinarily Massive Cluster of Red Supergiants" by Figer et al.  accepted on Ap.J. Here is a link

Jan. 30, 2006

- Listen to Massimo's interview at Planetary Society Radio on the Orion nebula

Jan. 11, 2006

- Pictures from the AAS press conference available here

January 11, 2006

- ACS image of the Orion Nebula unveiled at the January 2006 AAS meeting

January 10, 2006

- My work mentioned twice by  Mike Griffin, head of NASA, during his keynote address at the AAS meeting:
"So astronomy was my first love among the scientific disciplines, and I will always be proud of having contributed in a small way to the Hubble Space Telescope project in the early 1980s. In fact, it is my deep appreciation of the importance of Hubble and all of the other great observatories, Chandra and Spitzer, to science and society that prompted my decision that NASA will, if at all possible, use one of the remaining flights of the Space Shuttle for Hubble servicing. Thanks, we still need to figure out if that's possible. And we still have one more test flight in our return to flight series to know what we've got in the way of a flying machine, but I am hopeful. But whatever the future may bring in this regard, we are very fortunate that Hubble has successfully operated for 15 years now, and along with two of its fellow NASA Great Observatories, those I just mentioned - Spitzer and Chandra - continues to make discoveries of fundamental scientific importance. Some of those discoveries are being highlighted at this conference in a display I just toured through, including the release of a multi-filter mosaic of the Orion Nebula, made with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys [here I am PI]; Hubble's imaging for the first time of the close companion star to Polaris; the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope's imaging of a remarkable nest of red super giant stars - 14 supernovas in the making [here I am Co-I. PI is Don Figer... great job Don!]- and the Chandra XRay Observatory's investigation of the affects of giant black holes and hot gasses in elliptical galaxies."
Question: how could those Polaris and Chandra guys do so well without me?

      - Monday August 8, 2005:  After more than six years with the Space Telescopes Division of the European Space Agency, I resigned and moved to a new position:  Full  Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore

   - Tuesday April 21, 2004: Telerobotic servicing of HST presented to NASA administrator (more...)

   - Friday April 2, 2004: Treasury HST program (104 orbits) approved for Cycle 13