Astronomy

Hubble Space Telescope has been launched by the shuttle Discovery in 1990. It released into an orbit 304 nautical miles above the Earth. Since then it’s circled Earth more than 97,000 times and provided more than 4,000 astronomers access to the stars not possible from inside Earth’s atmosphere. Hubble has helped answer some of science’s key questions and provided images that have awed and inspired the world.

Since then, four shuttle missions has been flying to the telescope, to replacing and repairing failed and faulty components and added new and improved cameras and scientific equipment. Now the fifth and also last mission has done the same again. Atlantis spacecraft’s crew - launched on May 11 - has been successfully installing several new scientific instruments.

The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph will observe the light put out by extremely faint, far-away quasars and see how that light changes as it passes through the intervening gas between distant galaxies. In this way scientists will learn what that gas is made of, how it’s changed over time and how it affects the galaxies around it. New Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) will allow Hubble to take large-scale, extremely clear and detailed pictures over a very wide range of colors. At ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths the WFC3 represents a dramatic improvement in capability over all previous Hubble cameras. It is also a very capable visible light camera, though by design not quite as capable at visible wavelengths as Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The WFC3 and ACS are designed to work together in a complementary fashion.

The new camera and spectrograph are designed to complement the scientific instruments already on the telescope – specifically the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. But pieces of those instruments have failed in past years – not the entire instrument, but specific pieces inside of them. The crew will replace only the pieces that have failed.

NASA hopes the final service will keep the telescope operate for another five to 10 years, before it is steered to reenter earth’s atmosphere and plunges into the ocean. A sad ending actually, for such a precious and one of the greatest scientific instruments ever built.

Post to: delicious, Digg, ma.gnolia, Stumbleupon