They've shed tears over Hubble. Been sleep-deprived because of Hubble. And met spouses thanks to Hubble.

Hundreds of employees at Boulder's Ball Aerospace & Technologies have helped build seven instruments for the Hubble Space Telescope - including two replacement devices that shuttle astronauts are set to install in 2008.

Thanks to their work, Hubble has captured dazzling images of distant stars, galaxies and planets - and helped scientists better grasp the universe's origins.

Deployed in 1990, Hubble has played a role in Ball employees' lives.

Find out how below and on Page 8.

Caring for telescope much like raising child

Hubble has been a labor of love for Walter Whitehead - one accompanied by exhaustion, despair and pride.

A notable moment came in the early 1990s. The engineer had wrapped up a nonstop 48-hour stint preparing a video for a presentation to NASA engineers in Maryland. The footage involved the corrective mirror Ball Aerospace was crafting for Hubble to fix a faulty one another company had built.

"I got it all done just in time to rush out to Stapleton," Whitehead says of the former Denver airport.

There, he chatted with Ball colleagues headed to the NASA presentation. He went to the bathroom. But sleep overcame the exhausted engineer.

"I fell asleep on the toilet. And I missed my plane," says Whitehead with a laugh.

It wasn't the first time Whitehead got wrapped up in Hubble. He came to Ball in 1983 and began working on Hubble in the late 1980s, at age 30. He is the father of two boys and a girl who range in age from 10 to 15.

A key mentor was Wallace "Wally" Meyer, a beloved engineer who oversaw much of Ball's Hubble work. Meyer, who was killed in a private plane crash in 2004, also was a calming influence on Whitehead.

While working on Hubble's corrective mirror one evening, Whitehead was stunned to find the mechanism he'd been toiling over for hours wasn't operating properly.

An emotionally spent Whitehead realized the wiring was faulty. "I broke down and started crying."

Meyer came to the rescue, reassuring Whitehead. The next day a smiling Meyer showed up with two magnets in his hand. By attaching the magnets to the outside of the mechanism, Meyer was able to reverse the magnetic field and make the mechanism work correctly.

"He could just see through the mud," Whitehead says.

Whitehead takes great pride in going to the Internet to print out poster-size photos snapped by Hubble of distant planetary nebulae and galaxies.

He pins the brilliant color imagery on the hallway walls and in the stairwells at Ball.

Why? "So people can see the fruits of their labor," he replies.

Walter Whitehead

• Age: 48

• Current job: principal design engineer

• Years spent on Hubble: 6

• Projects worked on: NICMOS, STIS and COSTAR

• Notable quote: "I have to credit Hubble with my interests in the stars and the universe. I'm now an amateur astronomer."

Ball Aerospace & Technologies' seven instruments built for Hubble

• GHRS: One of the original science instruments aboard Hubble, the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph was designed to detect ultraviolet light, which is emitted by all stars, planets and galaxies. Replaced in 1997.

• COSTAR: Installed in 1993, the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement corrected a faulty mirror originally installed on Hubble that generated blurry images. Due for removal in 2008.

• NICMOS: Installed in 1997, the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer is an infrared instrument able to see through interstellar gas and dust.

• STIS: Installed in 1997, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph separates light into component wavelengths, much like a prism.

• ACS: Installed in 2002, the Advanced Camera for Surveys has 10 times more "discovery power" than the one it replaced.

• COS: Scheduled for installation in 2008, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph will replace COSTAR.

• WFC3: Scheduled for installation in 2008, the Wide Field Camera 3 is a fourth-generation imaging camera that will supplement ACS.

Pair see stars, then each other

Hubble has been a matchmaker for Tammy Osborne.

The year was 1992. Osborne was a business analyst at Ball Aerospace. Her job: make sure the company stayed within budget and on schedule while building a Hubble spectrograph known by the acronym STIS.

A friend of Osborne's pulled her aside one day and mentioned a "cute" engineer doing Hubble work. The friend offered to introduce Osborne. The duo concocted an excuse and walked into his office.

"Tammy is looking to buy a car. Didn't you just buy one?" the friend asked, according to Osborne.

Osborne married her husband, Brian, on New Year's Eve 1994. The couple have three daughters ranging in age from 5 to 9.

The kids have latched on to Hubble. The oldest daughter's favorite mug boasts a photo of the Ball-built corrective mirror known as COSTAR.

A Hubble high point came in 1997. Osborne and her husband flew to Florida's Kennedy Space Center to watch an early morning launch of the shuttle Discovery as it roared off to install two Ball-built Hubble instruments. The couple had worked on both.

Armed with VIP tickets, the Osbornes watched from bleachers as the shuttle lit up the dark sky. "For us to share that was really exciting," Tammy Osborne recalls.

The couple plan to take their three daughters to next year's shuttle launch, which will mark the start of the 2008 Hubble repair mission.

Making use of the right stuff

Beth Kelsic came to Hubble by way of Folgers Coffee.

She honed skills she learned from packaging Folgers to ensure that Hubble's scientific gear could stand up to the intense rigors of space.

"I learned how to select materials. How to test materials. And how to work with suppliers," explains Kelsic, a mechanical engineer by training.

In the late 1970s, Kelsic worked at Procter & Gamble to help the company find better packaging to keep Folgers coffee fresher. The coffee is encased in several layers of foil and plastic film, or a laminate.

The package also has a valve that allows the coffee to be packaged fresh from the roaster and to "de-gas" in the package.

"I researched those valves," Kelsic says.

Kelsic came to Ball Aerospace in 1984 and began working on Hubble five years later.

"They needed somebody who had knowledge of graphite materials," says Kelsic, who studied them as a graduate student at Purdue University.

These composites offer high strength, stiffness and light weight, among other properties.

Kelsic helped select the metals, adhesives and composite materials used to build six of the seven instruments Ball built for Hubble.

She had to make sure, for example, the materials stood up to extreme temperatures of less than minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Kelsic also had to make sure the materials didn't encourage condensation buildup, which could create a film on the camera lens. That would "degrade" Hubble's photographic abilities.

The mother of three children ages 18 to 23, Kelsic and her husband have taken their kids to three Hubble-related shuttle launches.

"They were always exposed to what I was working on."

CU student's dream comes true

Hubble is a dream come true for Dennis Ebbets.

As a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Ebbets hoped some day he could have a hand in Hubble.

It was the mid-1970s. The Vietnam War was ending. The scientific community was pushing Congress to fund a space telescope, one that would become Hubble. Ebbets was in his 20s, getting a Ph.D. in astronomy.

It would be "cool," he figured, to be tied to the space telescope - in any way. "Some day I'll have a job that has a little connection to it," Ebbets told himself.

Fast forward three decades.

"I will have worked on Hubble from beginning to end," he says. "It's going to be my entire career."

Ebbets got his crack at Hubble in 1980, two years after graduating from CU. After applying for a job advertised on a university bulletin board, he landed a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin.

The UW scientist was helping develop a spectrograph for Hubble known by the acronym GHRS. Ball Aerospace was in charge of building the instrument.

Ebbets joined Ball in 1985.

Hubble has produced disappointment for Ebbets. A big one occurred in the office of a CU professor in 2003.

"Have you heard?" Ebbets recalls an anguished James Green asking him. He'd been working with the CU astrophysicist on a new spectrograph for Hubble. "Headquarters just canceled the servicing mission," Green continued, Ebbets says. "Our work is done. They're not going to install our instrument."

Headquarters was NASA. And former NASA chief Sean O'Keefe had just scrapped a shuttle mission to install the new $70 million spectrograph known by the acronym COS. O'Keefe made the decision after the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster that killed seven astronauts.

"I didn't believe it," Ebbets said.

But a happy ending appears in sight. That new spectrograph is scheduled to be on board a space shuttle next year for installation on Hubble.

Ball contest changed her life

Kristin Martinez can trace her Hubble work to sixth grade, when she attended a Boulder school across the street from Ball Aerospace.

It was 1984. Thanks to an essay she'd written about a space shuttle launch, Martinez was the only girl to win a Ball contest. Winners got a Florida plane ticket to watch the launch of the shuttle Discovery.

"It changed my life," she says. "At age 12, I was absolutely head over heels in love with space."

She also was in love with math and science - a passion that ultimately helped her land a job with Ball more than a decade later.

Martinez's six job interviews at Ball were rigorous, spanning eight hours in one day.

"They asked me to solve engineering problems right there on the spot," she recalls.

After getting four job offers, including one from Ball, Martinez signed on with the company in 1996. Ball immediately put her to work on a phone-booth-sized camera for Hubble known by the acronym ACS.

She "knew nothing" and was "scared to death" by her first assignment.

"You're going to do the shutters for the camera," Martinez recalls her boss telling her at the time.

But her Ball colleagues worked with her. She learned the ins and outs.

"They would mentor me, lead me and help me sift through the decisions of the design," says Martinez, the mother of three boys ranging in age from 22 months to 6 years.

Martinez ultimately designed three mechanisms that helped the camera operate. But there was a scary moment when a component she was in charge of failed a vibration test that simulates a space shuttle launch.

"It was making a horrible noise. Your heart just sinks," Martinez recalls. "I was devastated."

Lucky for her, she notes, the problem was "easily fixed."

Finding answers to deep problem

Tim Kelly won't forget the day Ball Aerospace technicians rushed into his office and told him a component had broken deep inside a piece of Hubble gear they'd been working on for five months.

"It was just a disaster," Kelly recalls. The year was 1994.

Working inside a vast "clean" room, the Ball team had been wrapping a special tank the size of a backyard grill with layer upon layer of tissue-thin insulation. A "snap" was heard coming from inside the insulation.

The tank contained a replacement camera - known by the acronym NICMOS - that Ball was building for Hubble. Now the tank was wrapped with hundreds of layers of insulation that also enclosed the broken component.

Huddled in a conference room, engineers and technicians began to brainstorm. "Everyone came up with ideas," Kelly recalls. They developed a plan within a few days.

The team took off the old insulation, fixed the broken component and rewrapped the tank.

"We invented new processes and tooling to reassemble the tank with its camera in just two months, vs. the five months it originally took us," Kelly says proudly.

While finding a fix for the tank was a Hubble high point for Kelly, an even higher one occurred before then, in 1991.

"I met my wife," Kelly notes.

She was a business analyst working on Hubble whose office was two doors down from his. The couple married in 1992.

85-hour weeks help fix a problem

John Troeltzsch was "crushed" when he heard the news in 1990 that the images the new Hubble Space Telescope was transmitting back to Earth were blurry.

Ball Aerospace and Troeltzsch weren't responsible for the faulty mirror that caused the problem. But Ball and its 29-year-old software engineer had worked on a separate instrument - a spectrograph - that was aboard.

Hubble was a matter of pride for Troeltzsch and others when it was deployed in 1990.

"Everyone working was convinced we'd built the greatest machine ever built," recalls Troeltzsch, who joined Ball in 1983.

But then came news of the poor images. Hubble became a butt of jokes for late-night TV host David Letterman.

Troeltzsch went from proudly telling seat mates on airplanes that he had worked on Hubble to merely mumbling the fact in passing.

A second chance came when Ball landed the job of fixing the mirror - it had been ground and polished to the wrong specifications - through a project dubbed COSTAR.

Troeltzsch and members of the Ball team spent 85-hour weeks feverishly building the corrective mirror. Troeltzsch worked 70 days straight.

At the time, a colleague snapped a photo of an exhausted Troeltzsch asleep on a Saturday afternoon while seated atop a large piece of test equipment.

He went from being "crushed" to being elated in January 1994, a few weeks after shuttle astronauts installed the corrective mirror on Hubble.

He was standing in the control room at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore when Hubble's early images began beaming back to Earth.

The color images, displayed on a computer screen, showed a bright cloud of gas and dust known as a nebula.

The mirror fix had exceeded expectations.

"We were looking at pictures of the universe no humans had ever seen," marvels Troeltzsch - who, by the way, met his future wife thanks to Hubble.

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