Ellen Fiddian

speaker

105 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 11 Sep

Ellen Fiddian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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The Science Show · AI boost for people with dyslexia and how algorithms shape what we read · 11 Sep 2026 podcast

And so once they had these leftover spy satellites, they ended up sending them to NASA because they thought NASA might as well be able to use them.

Yeah, yeah.

It's something that they've always kind of known the NRO is up to.

The reason the Hubble was the size that it was was because it was easier to make that mirror because there was already expertise in making mirrors of that size.

So it's something that's always kind of been linked to the US military and their space observation.

So presumably th

Yes, exactly.

And there's still discussions about what to do with the second of the two telescopes the NRO donated.

There's talk about maybe they could send it to the moon, maybe they could send it to Mars, and there's a suggestion that they use it for scientific Earth observation because it's supposed to be really good at that, because that's what it was made for.

So yeah, they were originally designed to be pointed at the Earth, but NASA repurposed the Roman space telescope and sent it to space.

And it saved them probably about two hundred and fifty.

thirty million US dollars on the project.

So it did make it much cheaper to put this telescope together.

Nancy Grace Roman was the first chief of astronomy at NASA in the 1960s and 70s.

She was also the first female executive at NASA.

And she's kind of got this nickname as the mother of Hubble because she was the person who really, really pushed for space telescopes in the first place.

She said to be able to get out of the Earth's atmosphere is just going to make us so much better at astronomy and so much better at understanding the universe.

So she was one of the first.

real forces behind the push for a space telescope and the push eventually for the Hubble Space Telescope.

August.

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