{"id":12511,"date":"2020-04-24T18:41:54","date_gmt":"2020-04-24T10:41:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/hubble-still-going-strong-30-years-after-launch\/"},"modified":"2020-04-24T18:41:54","modified_gmt":"2020-04-24T10:41:54","slug":"hubble-still-going-strong-30-years-after-launch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/hubble-still-going-strong-30-years-after-launch\/","title":{"rendered":"Hubble still going strong 30 years after launch"},"content":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION<\/p>\n

\"\"
The Hubble Space Telescope was deployed from the space shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990, one day after its launch from the Kennedy Space Center. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thirty years ago Friday, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched aboard the shuttle Discovery with a famously flawed mirror, the opening chapter in an improbable saga of redemption and scientific discovery that revolutionized humanity\u2019s view of the cosmos with jaw-dropping images now familiar to millions.<\/p>\n

The list of Hubble\u2019s achievements is both long and stunning, everything from proving the existence of supermassive black holes to pinning down the age of the universe to within a few percent.<\/p>\n

Hubble\u2019s exquisite vision has allowed astronomers to study the chemical make up of exoplanet atmospheres, to capture flyby-class views of planets in Earth\u2019s solar system and to collect mind-bending \u201cdeep field\u201d images showing the first galaxies coalescing in the wake of the big bang.<\/p>\n

Adam Riess shared a Nobel Prize for Hubble research that helped confirm the expansion of the universe is accelerating, not slowing down or flattening out as expected, one of Hubble\u2019s most profound results. He\u2019s using the telescope now to help resolve discrepancies in that expansion rate, high-stakes research that could reshape the theoretical underpinnings of cosmology.<\/p>\n

\u201cObviously there will be other telescopes, but I don\u2019t know if there\u2019s going to be a telescope that takes us as far from sort of where we were to where we end up,\u201d Riess said in an interview.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s almost like when (sailors first) circumnavigated the globe, there\u2019s only sort of one time that you get to open up that much unexplored territory. Hubble arrived at a time when we had never seen the universe with that kind of crisp resolution and able to see so far out. The new telescopes will really help follow up on so much of what we learned from Hubble. It\u2019s just that Hubble was such a game changer.\u201d<\/p>\n

James Fanson, project manager of the Giant Magellan Telescope, one of the huge new ground-based observatories now under development, said in a statement that Hubble had revolutionized astronomy \u201cin the same way Galileo\u2019s telescope did 400 years ago when first turned to the heavens.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHubble\u2019s images reached the level of art, and it\u2019s discoveries touched the imagination of ordinary people around the world. Hubble became the \u2018people\u2019s telescope,\u2019 and it will always have a cherished place in our history and culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

NASA planned to unveil a 30th anniversary photo from Hubble on Friday as part of a relatively subdued celebration. Because of coronavirus travel restrictions, a variety of events marking the anniversary have been put on hold.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll unveil the image for our staff just as it\u2019s being unveiled for everybody else around the world,\u201d said Ken Sembach, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute. \u201cAnd it is spectacular. We\u2019re going to be doing that virtually, though. We had all kinds of events planned around the world and with COVID, it\u2019s just going to be different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of Hubble\u2019s most spectacular discoveries were unimagined when the telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, especially after engineers discovered its supposedly near-perfect 94.5-inch primary mirror was perfectly flawed, a victim of spherical aberration that prevented the telescope from bringing starlight to a sharp focus.<\/p>\n

Seven years behind schedule and some 400 percent over budget, Hubble had been launched to great fanfare and promises from NASA that it would take astronomy to new heights. Spherical aberration was an utterly gut-wrenching, almost impossible-to-believe defect, caused by an oversight during the mirror\u2019s fabrication.<\/p>\n

The dismal news was announced on June 27, 1990, and Hubble quickly became the butt of jokes on late night television and the subject of heated congressional hearings, including one two days later in which Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a long-time NASA supporter whose district included the Goddard Space Flight Center, famously referred to Hubble as a \u201ctechno turkey.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat does this mean for the rest of the things you want to do?\u201d she was quoted by UPI. \u201cAre we going to keep ending up with techno turkeys? I think this has seriously hurt the credibility of NASA when they\u2019ve had so much time and enough money to get it right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Said now-retired Hubble project scientist Ed Weiler, recalling the sense of despair that many felt: \u201cWe went from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of Death Valley.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, people would stop me, pushing my little girl around the block, saying I\u2019m so so sorry you have to work on that national disgrace,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s great when your neighbors tell you that, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
Ed Weiler, former Hubble chief scientist and former head of NASA\u2019s science directorate. Credit: NASA \/ W. Hrybyk<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But engineers quickly figured out a way to correct Hubble\u2019s blurry vision: installing a new camera, one that Weiler had recommended earlier, with relay mirrors ground to prescriptions that would exactly counteract the primary mirror\u2019s aberration.<\/p>\n

Building on that idea, another device, known as COSTAR, was designed to direct corrected light into Hubble\u2019s other instruments.<\/p>\n

During a make-or-break December 1993 shuttle servicing mission, the new Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and COSTAR were installed by spacewalking astronauts. They also replaced Hubble\u2019s solar panels and other critical components.<\/p>\n

The following January, NASA unveiled the results during a news conference at Goddard: crystal-clear views of a galaxy known as M-100 that left no doubt Hubble was finally ready for prime time. Before the briefing began, Weiler showed Mikulski the pictures.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had them all laid out,\u201d he said. \u201cI had a picture of M-100 taken with spherical aberration, taken from the ground and then taken from Hubble, all three together. And she walked in. She looked at them and she said, \u2018my God, it\u2019s like putting on my glasses.\u2019 I\u2019ll never forget that moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

NASA would go on to launch four more servicing missions, installing new, state-of-the-art instruments and replacing aging components like critical fine guidance sensors and gyroscopes, which move the telescope from target to target and then lock-on with rock-solid stability for detailed observations.<\/p>\n

Eleven years after NASA\u2019s fifth and final servicing mission in May 2009, Hubble is still going strong. The Space Telescope Science Institute still receives some 1,200 observing proposals each year, of which only about 250 can be accommodated.<\/p>\n

\u201cHubble\u2019s doing extremely well,\u201d Sembach said. \u201cIt\u2019s still operating at peak performance. That means that it\u2019s continuing to have a full schedule of observations. In fact, the observatory\u2019s probably as efficient right now in conducting science as it\u2019s ever been. All the instruments are working really well.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said Hubble\u2019s subsystems also are behaving \u201creasonably well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo good power, good pointing, good communications, good storage,\u201d he said. \u201cThe gyros are operating better than we had expected. There are some little issues here and there, but we\u2019re dealing with those with flight software changes and so forth. So right now it\u2019s actually looking really good.\u201d<\/p>\n

The gyros are critical to Hubble\u2019s longevity. The telescope was launched with six ultra-stable gyroscopes, but only three at a time are needed for normal operation. During the final servicing mission, all six were replaced but since then, three have failed, leaving Hubble without any redundancy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main issue that we\u2019re seeing in one of them \u2026 is the bias rate,\u201d Sembach said. \u201cEvery gyro has a little drift over time, it drifts a little bit from the position it thinks it\u2019s pointing to the position it senses. And so that\u2019s something that we correct all the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn one case, one of the gyros, that bias level is getting up to levels where it\u2019s getting a little bit more flaky at times, which means we occasionally lose a guide star acquisition, or the pointing isn\u2019t quite as good as we would have liked. That\u2019s still a small number of cases. And the bias levels that we see are still within the range of being correct.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be on the safe side, engineers have developed software that would allow Hubble to operate with just two gyros or even one. The downside is the telescope could only reach targets in about half the sky at any given time instead of 85 percent or more with all three gyros.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thought would be, at least at the moment, that if one of those three gyros fails, we would, in fact, drop to one gyro control and turn the other one off to preserve its lifetime if we thought that that was the right thing to do at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Based on Hubble\u2019s current health, he added, \u201cwe should have another good five years in it. And maybe longer. I would, for one, never bet against Hubble.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neither would Riess.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou should never count out Hubble, that\u2019s what I\u2019ve learned,\u201d Riess said. \u201cWe\u2019re pretty optimistic we can get five more years. But as I said, I wouldn\u2019t count it out. If we come back in, you know, 10 years or 15 years and we found a way to keep it going in some useful way, that wouldn\u2019t shock me either.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION The Hubble Space Telescope was deployed from the space shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990, one day after its launch from the Kennedy Space Center. Credit: NASA Thirty years ago Friday, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched aboard the shuttle Discovery with a famously flawed mirror, the opening […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1661,1690,1790,898,472,1390,1692],"class_list":["post-12511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-astronomy","tag-astrophysics","tag-goddard-space-flight-center","tag-hubble-space-telescope","tag-lockheed-martin","tag-space-shuttle","tag-space-telescope-science-institute"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12511"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}