I’ve written about SCUBA-2 before (here, here and here), but this story is about its predecessor, SCUBA. The Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array was a groundbreaking camera on the JCMT from 1996 until its retirement due to technical issues in 2006. One survey of astronomical instruments found that SCUBA was the second-most influential instrument in all of astronomy, second to the Hubble Space Telescope.
It comes as no surprise then that the Royal Astronomical Society has awarded the SCUBA team with the Group Achievement Award:
The Group Achievement Award goes to the Sub-millimetre Common User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) team. The SCUBA camera was built at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh and mounted on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, where it operated from 1996 to 2006. SCUBA enabled astronomers to map the sky at sub-millimetre wavelengths (beyond infrared) with unprecedented speed. Amongst a suite of discoveries, SCUBA provided the first images of rotating debris disks around Sun-like stars, with direct evidence for the formation of planets. Scientists have produced papers on the basis of SCUBA data at a prolific rate, with the level of citations for these second only to the Hubble Space Telescope.
Congratulations to the SCUBA team!
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