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Current Affairs:(Science &Technology, Environment and Biodiversity)
Hubble Space Telescope marking 25th anniversary in orbit:
One of NASA’s crowning glories, the Hubble Space Telescope, marks its 25th anniversary this week.
About the Telescope:
- With 1 million-plus observations, including those of some of the farthest and oldest galaxies ever beheld by humanity, no man-made satellite has touched as many minds or hearts as Hubble.
- NASA is celebrating Friday’s anniversary with ceremonies this week at the Smithsonian Institution and the Newseum in Washington.
- “Hubble has become part of our culture very much,” said NASA’s science mission chief, John Grunsfeld, a former astronaut who flew on the final three Hubble repair missions.
- A look at Hubble’s quarter-century in orbit about 560 km above Earth:
A blurry start:
- A full decade in the making, Hubble rocketed into orbit on April 24, 1990, aboard space shuttle Discovery.
- NASA wanted an observatory free of the atmosphere’s distortion and, in some cases, absorption of light. Stars, for example, do not appear to twinkle when seen from space. The telescope was named for American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who in the 1920s determined that the universe is expanding.
- Sky-high excitement turned into bottomless agony when it quickly became apparent that the telescope’s primary mirror had been botched during manufacturing, resulting in blurry eyesight. Three years later, with NASA’s reputation and entire future on the line, a team of astronauts managed to restore Hubble’s promised vision with replacement parts.
Future:
NASA’s Grunsfeld said “there’s pretty high probability” that Hubble will keep working until at least 2020. Gravity is slowly lowering the telescope’s approximately 560-million kilometre-high orbit, but the good news is that low solar activity is keeping the atmosphere thinner, which in turn should keep Hubble up until the 2030s.
Successor:
- NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is due to be launched in 2018 to a vantage point 1.6 million kilometres away.
- The Webb will specialise in the infrared wavelength, allowing it to peer into some of the faintest, most distant recesses of the universe. This should enable the telescope named after the late NASA administrator, who guided the Mercury and Gemini programs, and set the stage for the Apollo moon landings to look back even farther in time than Hubble and detect galaxies formed a mere 200 million years following the Big Bang.
- By 2019, Webb should be up and running with the Hubble still in action and powerful, new ground telescopes pointing skyward.