[Reminder: I'm covering the STIS repair live on Twitter on my BANews account.]
I was driving around Boulder the other day running some errands, and my travels took me past Ball Aerospace. I spotted this sign hanging from the side of the main building:
This made me smile. Ball is where many of the instruments on board Hubble were built. That includes the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, or STIS, one of the finest cameras ever flown in space. And I know: I helped calibrate it. Back in 1994, right after getting my PhD, I got a short-lived job working on COBE, which at the time was winding down after a long and highly successful mission. But because the project was closing down, it was a difficult work environment (which is true for any project): the computing equipment was aging, the money was tight, and the only problems left to solve ...
