The WOW Factor - Reading between the pixels of the Hubble's latest images

The WOW Factor - Reading between the pixels of the Hubble's latest images
By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, December 6, 2009

Dr. Gene Nelson sent me a link to an article in the Washington Post about the Hubble Telescope.
It is 4 long html pages and gives us something to think about. We have these WOW moments when we look at the Hubble images. Then again, having seen a lot of them, we may be in danger of burnout.
http://hubblesite.org/
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/

At the beginning of the Apollo missions it was all news and excitement, then things dropped to sound bytes. We are again at the Moon, will this too become sound bytes?
Check out the article.
- LRK -
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/30/AR2009113003590.html
The Wow Factor
Reading between the pixels of the Hubble's latest images

By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, December 6, 2009

By this point, we've all seen so many pretty Hubble pictures that we're in danger of pretty-Hubble-picture burnout. We've seen exploding stars galore. We've seen majestic pillars of gas that are spawning new solar systems. We've seen galaxies colliding, galaxies getting ripped apart, galaxies becoming mired in their own ennui. We've seen Mars and Jupiter and Saturn in such stark close-ups that we can detect the cosmetic surgery scars.

We've seen quasars, pulsars, brown dwarfs, exoplanets, globular clusters and assorted nebulosities. It feels as if we've seen it all. Literally. The whole cosmos, soup to nuts. It kind of makes you wonder if we'll run out of new things to discover. Here's a real headline on a November news release from Stanford: "High-precision measurements confirm cosmologists' standard view of the universe." All figured out; everyone go home now.

So, you can just imagine the challenge that NASA's Hubble Space Telescope scientists faced earlier this year. In May, astronauts aboard the space shuttle Atlantis flew to the Hubble and, defying a stuck bolt that nearly derailed the mission, removed an old camera and replaced it with a better one. They fixed two other instruments, even though these things were not designed for orbital maintenance. Crew members installed new gyroscopes and batteries. After five spacewalks and much derring-do, Hubble was, in effect, a brand-new space telescope.

But what to look at next? The Hubble people had to pick targets to demonstrate the revamped telescope's abilities. They would call these images the Early Release Observations, or ERO (at NASA, everything has an abbreviation). They wanted to produce pictures with lots of (their
term) Wow Factor.

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Dr. Nelson has been looking at the WFPC-2 which was recently retrieved from the Hubble Space Telescope and is at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) for a short time. He has seen many visible pits where space debris has struck the radiator surface while it was deployed. WFPC-2 will be on exhibit at NASM for about 2 months, then it will travel to JPL Maybe if you are in the Washington D.C. area you have a chance to visit NASM. At the top of the above article there is a link to comments and Dr. Nelson posted one. There are a lot more of them now but I will leave you with what he wrote.
- LRK -

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/30/AR2009113003590_Comments.html#
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The National Air and Space Museum (NASM) on the Mall had a special day-long symposium regarding the Hubble Legacy on 18 November 2009.
http://www.nasm.si.edu/events/eventDetail.cfm?eventID=1636

As a symposium attendee, I appreciated the thought-provoking presentations and panel discussions. There are some special artifacts from the Hubble Space Telescope including COSTAR and the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) that are on special exhibition at the NASM. Some of them will only be there until the end of December, 2009. Be sure and schedule a visit before then. The new "Moving Beyond Earth" Gallery has two of the three new Hubble artifacts - and plenty of "Wow!" with some innovative large scale moving graphics.

(The Hubble Legacy Symposium was made possible by financial support from the Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.)
12/5/2009 9:49:59 PM
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Step back, take a breath, and prepare for a New Year and many more WOW events.
Don't let the excitement wane.
Give it away and watch it come back.

There is much, much, more to learn.
WOW!
- LRK -

Thanks for looking up with me.

Larry Kellogg

Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
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http://hubblesite.org/

Two of Hubble's key instruments now reside at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. The optical device that fixed Hubble's original flawed vision and Hubble's longest-lasting, most prolific camera, both removed during the last servicing mission, will be on display through mid-December. The instruments will then travel for temporary display in California before becoming permanently part of the Smithsonian's collection in March 2010
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http://hubblesite.org/gallery/
Capture the extraordinary. Explore the universe through Hubble's eye, and witness the most dangerous, spectacular and mysterious depths of the cosmos.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a space telescope that was carried into orbit by the space shuttle in April 1990. It is named after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble. Although not the first space telescope, the Hubble is one of the largest and most versatile, and is well-known as both a vital research tool and a public relations boon for astronomy. The HST is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, and is one of NASA's Great Observatories, along with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope.[4]

Space telescopes were proposed as early as 1923. The Hubble was funded in the 1970s, with a proposed launch in 1983, but the project was beset by technical delays, budget problems, and the Challenger disaster. When finally launched in 1990, scientists found that the main mirror had been ground incorrectly, severely compromising the telescope's capabilities. However, after a servicing mission in 1993, the telescope was restored to its intended quality. Hubble's orbit outside the distortion of Earth's atmosphere allows it to take extremely sharp images with almost no background light. Hubble's Ultra Deep Field image, for instance, is the most detailed visible-light image ever made of the universe's most distant objects. Many Hubble observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, such as accurately determining the rate of expansion of the universe.

The Hubble is the only telescope ever designed to be serviced in space by astronauts. There have been five servicing missions, the last occurring in May 2009. Servicing Mission 1 took place in December 1993 when Hubble's imaging flaw was corrected. Servicing missions 2, 3A, and 3B repaired various sub-systems and replaced many of the observing instruments with more modern and capable versions. However, following the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia accident, the fifth servicing mission was canceled on safety grounds. After spirited public discussion, NASA reconsidered this decision, and administrator Mike Griffin approved one final Hubble servicing mission. STS-125 was launched in May 2009, and installed two new instruments and made numerous repairs.

The latest servicing should allow the telescope to function until at least 2014, when its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is due to be launched. The JWST will be far superior to Hubble for many astronomical research programs, but will only observe in infrared, so it will complement (not replace) Hubble's ability to observe in the visible and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum.

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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK

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