Space is Big
February 17th, 2011 - 12:51 pm
The Hubble Space Telescope has been taking pictures from low earth orbit for 21 years already, and it’s still doing OK work.
From the Space.com story:
A stunning new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope shows newborn stars studding a galaxy like bright blue jewels.
The spiral galaxy, called NGC 2841, lies in the constellation Ursa Major, about 46 million light-years from Earth. Hubble’s newest instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), took the photo, in which newborn stars show up as bright blue clumps.
The universe is a pretty cool place.
It’s the coolest place there is.
It better be the coolest, it’s the only one we have.
More accurately, the HST was launched 21 years ago this April. However, for the first 3 years, it didn’t return very many useful images because the mirrors were flawed. It took a shuttle mission to fix the mirrors (and replace the faulty solar panels and several reaction control wheels) before HST started returning good images. Before the fix, it was able to perform some useful observations but the instrument was seriously degraded overall.
I got to see the HST at a Lockheed facility back in 1988. It’s about the size of a bus. It was being worked on in a clean room. Originally scheduled for launch in 1983, it was subject to many technical issues and cost overruns (familiar for any NASA program) and further delayed by the Challenger accident. In all those years, either no one thought to test the mirrors or they didn’t think it was necessary. In the end, the repair mission cost about a billion dollars. Smart management, guys!
Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
So, can I ‘ave your liver?
Notice the bright center of the galaxy? It’s got to be the destruction of an accretion disk from a ungodly huge singularity.
Nah. It’s taken this long for the flash of the first Death Star being destroyed, to reach us.
Fantastic photo, VP, thanks. I think Hubble’s photos of galaxy clusters are the best photographs ever taken. Here’s one.
The Deep Field makes my head spin. They took a picture of a tiny area of “nothing,” and came back with that. Amazing.