Hubble Opens New Eyes on the Universe

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, ready to uncover new worlds, peer ever deeper into space, and even map the invisible backbone of the universe. The first snapshots from the refurbished Hubble showcase the 19-year-old telescope's new vision.

Topping the list of exciting new views are colorful multi-wevelength pictures of far-flung galaxies, a eerie "pilar of cretation," and a "butterfly" nebula. With its new imaging camera, Hubble can view galaxies, star clusters, and other objects across a wide swath of the electromanetic spectrum, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light.

A new spectrograph slices across billions of light-years to map the filamentary structure of the universe and trace the distribution of elements that are fundamental to life.

The telescope's new instruments also are more sensitive to light and can observe in ways that are significantly more efficient and require less observing time than previous generations of Hubble instruments.

NASA astronauts installed the new instruments during the space shuttle servicing mission in May 2009. Besides adding the instruments, the astronauts also completed a dizzying list of other chores that included performing unprecedented repairs on two other science instruments.

Now that Hubble has reopened for business, it will tacle a whole range of observations. Looking closer to Earth, such observations will include taking a census of the population of Kuiper Belt objects residing at the fringe of our solar system, witnessing the birth of planets around other stars, and probing the composition and structure of the atmospheres of other worlds.

Peering much farther away, astromers have ambitious plans to use Hubble to make the deepest-ever portrait of the universe in near-infrared light. The rerulting picture may reveal never-before-seen infant galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 500 million years old.

Hubble also is now significantly more well-equipped to probe and further characterize the behavior of dark energy, a mysterious and little-understood repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.

Source: http://hubblesite.org

Planet-Hunting Kepler Telescope Lifts Its Lid

The hunt is on. The Kepler spacecraft opened to the universe this week and is getting set to search for Earth-size planets around distant stars. Perhaps we'll find a home for E.T. I'm simply thrilled that this critical next step went off without a hitch.

On Tuesday evening, the Kepler spacecraft blew its lid. Well, actually it was a lot calmer than that; the cover was ejected in a carefully engineering maneuver.

At 7:13:36 PM, engineers at Kepler's mission operations center at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), Boulder, Colo., sent commands to pass an electrical current through a "burn wire" to break the wire and release a latch holding the cover closed. The spring-loaded cover swung open on a fly-away hinge, and then drifted away from the spacecraft.

The teloscope's oval-shaped dust cover, measuring 1.7 meters by 1.3 meters (670 inches by inches), protected the photometer from contamination before and after launch. The dust cover also blocked stray light from entering the telescope during launch-v light that could have damaged its sensitive detectors.

In addition, the cover was important for calibrating the photometer. Images taken in the dark helped characterize noise coming from the instrument's electronics, and this noise will later be removed from the actual science data.

"The cover released and flew away exactly as we designed it to do," said Kepler Project Manager James Fanson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This is a critical step toward answering a question that has come down to us across 100 generations of human history-are there other planets like Earth, or are we alone in the galaxy?"

"Now the photemeter can see the stars and will soon start the task of detecting the planets," said Kepler's Science Principal investigator William Borucki at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "We have thoroughly measured the background noise so that our photometer can detect minute changes in a star's brightness caused by planet."

Deputy Principal Investigator, Dr. David Koch, watched the cover ejection from NASA Ames Research Center, celebrating with the kepler Science Operations Center team.

"Besides launch, this was the most critical event for the Kepler spacecraft, and everything went as expected," he said. "The spacecraft settled after the ejection, and the star trackers were rock solid. The first images have been taken, and we look forward to reviewing those shortly. It was a truly exciting event."

With the cover off, starlight is entering the photemeter and being imaged onto its focal plane. Engineers will continue calibrating the instrument using images of stars for another several weeks, after which science observations will begin.


By Edna DeVore, SETI Institute, www.space.com