Paul Scowen 1977 to 1984
Paul Scowen arrived at St Mary’s from St Anselm’s, Dartford, along with Martin Johnston and Paul Hedderman in 1977 and quickly demonstrated he was one of the most intellectually able in the year, particularly excelling at Maths and Physics.
After his A-Levels (which included an A grade in Physics), Paul went to the University of Birmingham to pursue his interests in Physics and Astronomy. While there he served as the Chair of the University Astronomy Club and was on the University Archery Team.
A classic example of the UK ‘brain drain’, Paul says he then left for the US to study Astrophysics because of what he saw as the lacklustre job climate in physical science on these shores in the late 80s in the wake of the Thatcher era. He completed his Masters and Doctorate at Rice University in Houston, Texas where he met his wife Linda, an avid bassoon player. They are pictured above in Waikiki.
His first job was a particularly interesting one – he was hired to work on the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope at Arizona State University (ASU), but was also part of the larger instrument team at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.
Paul says: “I spent two exciting years being part of the team to build the new camera, the WFPC-2, that incorporated a corrective optic to fix the mirror error. The instrument was flown and installed on Hubble in December 1993 – we got to watch the night launch in Florida after having spent the entire night waiting and being eaten alive by mosquitoes.
“We then retired to the same motel on Cocoa Beach that used to house the Apollo families during the 60s, and while sitting around the pool with our feet in the water drinking champagne, we saw the Hubble fly over, followed a minute or two later by the Shuttle aiming to catch up to her.”
After this Paul and the team went to Baltimore to supervise from the ground the instrument installation and analysing data to prove the telescope had been fixed: “We did a release of our data and images at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January 1994, in Washington DC, and received a standing ovation,” says Paul.
During the next five years, when Paul and Linda had their two children, Kegan and Kaitlin, he and the team worked on the now-repaired observatory and the Eagle Nebula was one of several science releases he was part of: “It was a very exciting time,” says Paul.
Since then Paul has moved on to designing and developing new instrumentation and now works on everything from cubesats (which are the size of a large cereal box) to designing new Explorer and Probe class missions which range in cost from $300M to $1B. He recently served as the Instrument Science Lead for the ultraviolet spectrograph (UVS) instrument on the large mission concept study named HabEx – which is a candidate for the next NASA Flagship project in the 2030s.
“I currently serve as a Professor of Astronomy in the School of Earth & Space Exploration at ASU and I can directly trace all my interests to the experiences I had while a student at St Marys.
“St Marys and St Josephs represented, as for many of us, very formative years – years where we grew from mere children with all the insecurities that comes along for the ride, into great friends, and impressive adults. It was in the end a great time for me.”