This morning, 350 miles above the Atlantic Ocean, a tender goodbye took place. Astronauts aboard the Atlantis space shuttle released the Hubble Space Telescope to conclude the telescope’s fifth and final repair mission. The better-than-new observatory is expected to send back breathtaking images and mind-rattling information about the universe for another five to seven years. As the NASA officials in charge of the telescope put it: “Hubble is now ready to resume its role as humankind’s most powerful eyes on the universe” [AP].
During this mission, Atlantis astronauts spent more than 36 hours over five marathon spacewalks to make upgrades and outfit Hubble with new instruments. These included a panchromatic wide-field camera that should be able to see objects formed just 500 million years after the universe’s birth in the big bang explosion some 13.7 billion years ago [Reuters]. But there were occasional glitches: When a bolt wouldn’t come free on the Sunday spacewalk, astronaut Mike Massimino had to resort to brute force, jerking the railing that it held in place until the bolt snapped. There was also an ill-timed incident this morning involving an antenna.
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Yesterday, about 350 miles above western Australia, two massively expensive pieces of space hardware rendezvoused in a delicate orbital dance. The space shuttle Atlantis arrived at the Hubble Space Telescope for the telescope’s fifth and final upgrade, and met the telescope in orbit as it circled the Earth at 17,200 miles per hour. With mission commander Scott Altman at the controls, Atlantis eased up within 30 feet of NASA’s flagship observatory, bringing the ship close enough for a capture attempt. Mission specialist Megan McArthur limbered up the shuttle’s robot arm and used snares at its end to latch on to a pin-like grapple fixture on the side of the gleaming telescope. “Houston, Atlantis. Hubble has arrived onboard Atlantis,” said Altman [Florida Today blog].
The astronauts audibly gasped as they drew up to the 12-ton telescope. “Just looking out the window here, and it’s an unbelievably beautiful sight,” said John M. Grunsfeld, a veteran astronaut. “Amazingly, the exterior of Hubble, an old man of 19 years in space, still looks in fantastic shape.” Dr. Grunsfeld, who is on his third Hubble repair trip, was one of the last humans to see the telescope in March 2002 and arguably knows it better than anyone on or above Earth [The New York Times].
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At 2:01 this afternoon in Florida, the space shuttle Atlantis is expected to roar off its launch pad and set off toward the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, for the fifth and final repair mission in the telescope’s history. The countdown timeline is on target, and “Atlantis is ready to fly,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA’s test director…. The 11-day mission will include five spacewalks to refurbish Hubble with state-of-the-art science instruments. After the upgrades, the telescope’s capabilities will be expanded, and its lifetime extended through at least 2014 [CNN].
The current mission carries a higher degree of danger than the space shuttle’s habitual jaunts to the International Space Station. Hubble orbits about 350 miles above Earth, in an area with a higher density of debris. Earlier this year two satellites collided over Siberia, which has increased the risk even more, as junk from that collision drifts lower [ABC News]. While NASA will track orbiting space junk as it always does, the agency has also taken the precaution of getting the space shuttle Endeavor ready for launch on another pad in case a rescue operation is necessary.
NASA will cover the launch live on NASA TV, and DISCOVER’s own Bad Astronomy blogger, Phil Plait, will be posting updates on his breaking news Twitter account.
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The first ever picture of an exoplanet was taken 11 years ago–but no one noticed. Now, in a new study, astronomers have subtracted the starlight from an image taken by the Hubble in 1998, and found the exoplanet by its dim infrared glow. While some exoplanets were detected before 1998, they were discovered indirectly by observing their influence on their parent stars; this was was seen directly.
The new technique has excited researchers wondering how many more new planets can be found in old, archived data. “They’ve dug up old Hubble images and found a planet! Crazy!” Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, commented by email. “This will spawn a wild race by astronomers everywhere in the world to dig out their old Hubble images to hunt for planets lost in the rubble of the Hubble” [National Geographic News].
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For the first time, carbon dioxide has been detected in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope report. Although the Jupiter-sized planet, which closely orbits the star HD 189733 about 63 light-years from Earth, is much too hot to support life, scientists are hailing the discovery as an exciting technical achievement. “In that context, the carbon dioxide measurement constitutes a dress rehearsal …for our long-term goal of trying to detect signs of life or signs of habitability on terrestrial-mass planets or super Earths in the habitable zone,” [Science News] says Mark Swain of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Researchers deduced the presence of carbon dioxide by measuring the planet’s light spectrum with the Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). To isolate the light spectrum coming from the planet, researchers used a method known as “secondary transit.” This involves recording the light spectrum of the planet and its star, and then measuring the spectrum of the star alone while the planet is hidden behind it. The difference of the two spectra is the spectrum of the light coming directly from the planet [Nature News]. Unlike previous measurements that focused on the mid-infrared range, NICMOS took measurements in the near-infrared range, enabling detection of the carbon dioxide signature.
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In news that has thrown astronomers and space enthusiasts into a tizzy of excitement, two separate research teams announced today that they have taken the first pictures of exoplanets, planets orbiting stars beyond the edge of our solar system. It’s an achievement that has long been considered vital in the search for planets like our own [Physics World].
One team spotted a single planet circling a bright star only 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, while the other detected three giant planets orbiting a star 130 light-years away in the Pegasus constellation.
More than 300 so-called extrasolar planets have been found circling distant stars, making their discovery the hottest and fastest growing field in astronomy. But the observations have been made mostly indirectly, by dips in starlight as planets cross in front of their home star or by wobbles they induce going by it. Astronomers being astronomers, they want to actually see these worlds, but a few recent claims of direct observations have been clouded by debates about whether the bodies were really planets or failed stars [The New York Times]. But these newly discovered celestial objects are the right size for planets, and were observed moving around their parent stars.
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After several weeks of remote-control repair work, the Hubble Space Telescope is back in action, and is once again taking breathtaking images of distant galaxies. Today, NASA released an image which it called a “perfect 10″ because the paired galaxies resemble the number 10. The picture was released this morning by NASA to demonstrate that the observatory’s workhorse Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 is on the job again [Baltimore Sun], and a happy NASA press release added that the camera scored a perfect 10 for both its performance and the beautiful results.
The image shows a pair of galaxies, known as Arp 147, which are about 400 million light years away from Earth. The two galaxies are thought to have collided, and the image shows that aftermath. The blue ring was formed after the galaxy on the left passed through the galaxy on the right. Just as a pebble thrown into a pond creates an outwardly moving circular wave, or ripples, an outwardly propagating ring of higher density was generated at the point of impact of the two galaxies, astronomers explained. As this excess density collided with outer material that was moving inwards due to the gravitational pull of the two galaxies, shocks and dense gas were produced, stimulating star formation [SPACE.com].
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Just yesterday, the NASA engineers who are working on a remote-controlled reboot of the malfunctioning Hubble Space Telescope were thrilled with their progress: “Everything’s going perfectly,” a NASA spokeswoman said, and she estimated that the telescope would resume sending science data back to earth today. But today NASA reported that engineers had run into a problem while powering up the system after its reboot.
After the Hubble’s main data handling computer went on the fritz in late September, engineers devised a plan to switch over to the telescope’s “Side B” backup computer, which had been dormant for 18 years. NASA said yesterday that the backup system was successfully brought up, and that the only task that remained was testing and calibrating the telescope’s scientific instruments to ensure they were working properly with the new computer. However on Friday NASA posted a notice on its website saying “the activation of the telescope’s science instruments and resumption of observations has been suspended following two anomalies seen in systems on the telescope Thursday” [Reuters].
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NASA has good news for fans of the spectacular stellar images produced by the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been unable to send data back to earth since a computer malfunctioned several weeks ago: Engineers have successfully powered up the Hubble’s backup data handling computer, which has slumbered in a dormant deep-freeze for the Hubble’s 18 years of operation, and NASA officials say the telescope should be sending scientific data again by tomorrow.
Engineers switched on the “Side B” backup system late Wednesday night. The engineers then briefly switched back on several of Hubble’s instruments — the Advanced Camera for Surveys, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer — to ensure that each had a working interface with the duplicate unit. The instruments were then commanded back into a dormant “safe mode,” in which they were hibernating since the observatory went silent [Science News].
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Tomorrow NASA engineers will begin a challenging remote-control fix of the malfunctioning Hubble Space Telescope; if all goes well, the Hubble should regain the capacity to send breathtaking stellar images back to Earth by Friday. The breakdown of a data-handling computer two weeks ago left the telescope crippled and unable to send data from its instruments; it also caused NASA to postpone its Hubble upgrade mission from October to sometime next February or so. The delay is costing NASA about $10 million a month, officials said [AP].
The fix requires powering down the entire telescope into “safe mode” and then turning on a backup data-handling system that has never been activated in the Hubble’s 18 years of space flight. Says Hubble manager Art Whipple: “It’s probably not unlike what an IT professional might do with an office network” [BBC News]. While NASA officials say there’s always a chance that the backup system won’t work, they also say they expect everything to go as planned. Says Whipple: “There’s very little ageing that goes on with an unpowered component in space,” he said. “It’s actually a very benign storage environment” [Reuters].
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A breakdown aboard the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope will delay the final space shuttle mission to upgrade and repair the aging telescope, which was scheduled to launch on October 14. NASA said today that the malfunction of a command and data-handling system means the telescope is unable to capture and beam down the data used to produce its stunning deep space images for which the Hubble is famous [Orlando Sentinel]. NASA officials said that system can’t be fixed remotely but added that they’re currently trying to activate a backup system.
The space shuttle Atlantis is already on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in preparation for its trip to the Hubble, but NASA says the unexpected glitch may delay the shuttle’s mission until early next year. Whenever Atlantis does fly, NASA may send up a replacement part for the failed component. It would take time to test and qualify the old replacement part and train the astronauts to install it in the telescope, said NASA spokesman Michael Curie. NASA also would have to work out new mission details for the astronauts who have trained for two years to carry out five Hubble repair spacewalks [AP].
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When the space shuttle Atlantis docks with the Hubble Space Telescope for a final repair mission in October, astronauts will face a unusually high risk of a catastrophic collision with orbital debris, NASA officials say. The amount of space junk in the environment around the Hubble adds another element of danger to the already challenging mission, which aims to keep NASA’s premier telescope in service until at least 2013.
The environment where Hubble flies, about 350 miles (560 km) above the planet, is more littered with shards of exploded spacecraft and rockets than the area around the International Space Station, which orbits about 210 miles above Earth. The odds of catastrophic damage from an orbital debris strike are 1 in 185 for the Hubble crew, compared with 1 in 300 for missions to the space station, John Shannon, the shuttle program manager, told reporters. “It’s our biggest risk,” he said [Reuters].
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In the heart of the Perseus galaxy cluster lies a remarkable galaxy known as NGC 1275, which has long “filaments”of glowing gas that snake out from its center. Astronomers have tried to explain how these beautiful structures can have survived for so long, given that the filaments reach out from their home galaxy into the Perseus cluster, which is a hostile, high-energy environment with a strong, tidal pull of gravity.These combined forces should have ripped apart the filaments in a very short time, causing them to collapse into stars [The Independent].
Now, thanks to images from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers say they understand how the filaments have held their shape for over 100 million years: Magnetic fields are keeping the filaments together, they say. The magnetic fields … hold onto the filaments because they wield influence over charged particles – such as protons and electrons – in the filaments’ gas [New Scientist].
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You may remember where you were when your car’s odometer rolled over 100,000 miles. NASA scientists are swelling with the same kind of pride over the Hubble Space Telescope, which has completed its 100,000th orbit of the Earth.
NASA celebrated the milestone by taking new pictures of a nearby star nursery, close to the Tarantula Nebula 170,000 light-years away. Ultraviolet radiation blazing from hot, young stars in the cluster has created dramatic ridges and valleys of dust. The intense radiation has also set aglow gaseous filaments and eroded away the dusty cocoons where newborn stars are being born, unveiling the hatchlings at the tops of serpent-shaped pillars [Science News].
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