On Wednesday, March 30, officials from the Hubble Space Telescope programme will present a new scientific discovery. According to NASA, the nearly 32-year-old telescope will make “one for the record books” and an “exciting new observation.”
Given that the Hubble Space Telescope‘s work ranges from exoplanets to galaxies to measuring the expansion of the universe, guessing what that discovery might be is difficult. The multi observatory team was awarded the Nobel Prize for this last part.
NASA has offered little other information beyond promising that the “Hubble’s result not only extends our understanding of the universe but creates an exciting area of research for Hubble’s future work with NASA’s newly-launched James Webb Space Telescope.”
Webb was launched on December 25 and is currently aligning its instruments and mirrors in preparation for observational work to begin in June. Moreover, Hubble is getting ready to mark the 25th anniversary of its launch from the space shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990.
Hubble’s decades of observations are serving as wayfinding for the newly launched Webb telescope, according to scientists from the Webb telescope team.
Although Webb is billed as Hubble Space successor, NASA officials have stated that Hubble will remain operational at least until the 2020s. Hubble, on the other hand, had a problem in October 2021 that took its instruments offline for several weeks, but it was back online in December. In July 2021, the observatory also recovered from a major malfunction.
Hubble used to be serviced every few years by astronauts aboard the space shuttle, but that work ended when the space shuttle programme ended in 2011. Hubble’s last servicing mission took place in 2009.
Webb, which operates at a stable gravitational point called Lagrange 2, 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometres) from Earth, is unlikely to benefit from such visits because it is much further away.
Several of Hubble’s most recent images have been of galaxies. Examining a spiral galaxy that lies beneath part of the Virgo Cluster (of which our Milky Way is also a part) and imaging the dusty “eye” of another galaxy similar to our own are two examples.
Facts on Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope (also known as HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low-Earth orbit in 1990 and is still operational today. It was not the first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most versatile, renowned as a vital research tool as well as an astronomy public relations boon.
The Hubble Space Telescope is one of NASA’s Great Observatories and is named after astronomer Edwin Hubble. Hubble has a 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in) mirror, and its five main instruments look at the electromagnetic spectrum in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared regions. Hubble’s orbit allows it to capture extremely high-resolution images with significantly less background light than ground-based telescopes due to its orbit outside the distortion of Earth’s atmosphere.
It has captured some of the most detailed visible-light images, giving it a unique perspective into space. Many Hubble observations have led to astrophysics breakthroughs, such as determining the universe’s expansion rate.
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has provided a dazzling array of images that have awed and inspired the public since its launch in 1990.
Hubble, on the other hand, is about much more than pretty pictures. Over the course of decades, the mission has collected dozens of terabytes of data, revealing important details about the universe, from objects as close as the moon to the farthest galaxies, with observations of supernovas and nebulas in between.
The Wide Field Planetary Camera, the Goddard High-Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS), the Faint Object Camera (FOC), the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS), and the High-Speed Photometer were among Hubble’s first instruments.
Right away, Hubble ran into problems with his equipment. For example, the telescope’s first images were so blurry that they were practically useless in terms of science.
Hubble Space became a punchline in a slew of jokes that spread across the internet. A photo of Hubble appears in the 1991 film “Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear.” It hangs alongside photographs of the Hindenburg, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Ford Edsel, and other well-known disasters on the wall of a bar called Loser’s Bar.
All was not lost, however, because Hubble was built to be serviced by astronauts. The space shuttle Endeavour ferried a crew of seven to Hubble on Dec. 2, 1993, for five days of spacewalks.
During the repair, two new cameras were installed, including the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC-2), which later took many of Hubble’s most famous photos. The first new Hubble images arrived on Earth in December 1993, and they were breathtaking.
However, Hubble Space has continued to provide unprecedented information about our universe and to pique the interest of inquiring minds all over the world.
Also Read: NASA’S SPITZER TELESCOPE LAUNCHED IN 2003, SPOTS HUGE DUST CLOUD IN SPACE
