Hubble Turns 25 45
Taco Cowboy points out that the Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 today.
Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Currently, it is flying about 340 miles over the Earth and circling us every 97 minutes. While the telescope itself is not really much to look at, that silver bucket is pure gold for astronomers. Scientists have used that vantage point to make ground-breaking observations about planets, stars, galaxies and to reveal parts of our universe we didn't know existed. The telescope has made more than a million observations and astronomers have used Hubble data in more than 12,700 scientific papers, "making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built," according to NASA. ... NASA aims to keep Hubble operating through at least 2020 so that it can overlap with its successor. The James Webb Space Telescope is due to launch in October 2018 and begin observations in mid-2019.
NASA celebrated by releasing a new, epic image from Hubble titled "Celestial Fireworks." It is accompanied by an impressive flythrough video. Some nice galleries of Hubble images have been put together at the NY Times and Slate, but a bigger collection is available directly from the official Hubble website.
Thanks, Hubble (Score:5, Interesting)
Both my scientific curiosity and my desktop backgrounds thank you.
Hubble is not dead? (Score:1)
Hubble was born on the same day as the telescope named after him?
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Hubble is a prime example of why we space nutters want to get people out there. When we sent Hubble up into its 375-mile orbit, it was nothing but a paperweight until we were able to send a crew up there to fix it.
Not to mention that it was carried into orbit using Space Shuttle as its "first stage."
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Of course, without the cost for the manned space program, we could have launched a dozen replacement telescopes, and still have money left over for a cake.
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Given that it's in a 375-mile orbit, Hubble was also (and still is) a pretty lousy paperweight.
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Who gives a shit?
How about "Civilization." It's hard to think of other modern projects that have advanced the knowledge base of humankind as far as the Hubble Space Telescope. Not bad for being a "multi-billion dollar flop" when launched.
Of all the things NASA has accomplished, this is one of the big ones.
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Not sure what civilization you are referring to, but here in the good ole' US-of-A everyone is primarily concerned about buying beer, their heroin addiction, and gay marriage.
The price of admission for us geeky folks to support the infrastructure responsible for the bread-and-circuses is that they have to throw a little bone (less than 1% of GDP) to things we think are cool. Otherwise we would all be cyberterrorists and commies.
The Best Investment (Score:3, Interesting)
I love the Hubble, love the pictures and the data, seriously one of the best investment we have made up there.
The single most mind blowing photo for me?
Hubble eXtreme Deep Field
http://www.nasa.gov/images/con... [nasa.gov]
Plenty Hubble photos are far more beautiful, but the sheer scale of it, the light of other times.
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The single most mind blowing photo for me? Hubble eXtreme Deep Field http://www.nasa.gov/images/con... [nasa.gov]
Too bad the picture was photobombed by Milky Way attention whoring stars.
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seriously one of the best investment we have made up there.
This is one of the reasons funding doesn't always go where it would make science progress the better. Hubble outcome is visually attractive and nice (photos). Other fields, particle accelerators, neutrino research etc... that people hardly understand, may not gather the same amount of enthusiasm.
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Other fields, particle accelerators, neutrino research etc... that people hardly understand, may not gather the same amount of enthusiasm.
While I agree that people hardly understand other fields, sometimes it's not a bad thing that they're not enthusiastic.
There was plenty of enthusiasm against the LHC. My memory isn't what it used to be, but I don't recall another scientific project of that scale that faced as much public, and even government, concern in my lifetime. Some of those people sounded like they were on the verge of getting out the pitchforks and torches.
Cassini having plutonium fuel was about as close as I can recall, but ev
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The Cassini flyby was before Facebook and Twitter. Seriously, the rise of clickbait journalism has made it very difficult to discriminate between genuine public concern and the meme-of-the-moment.
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My fav:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/imag... [nasa.gov]
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lulz...
Seems almost blasphemous...
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I did not like that picture the first time I saw it because I thought it was an overly busy collage. Then I realized that it was one single picture. Finally I realized that if I stood outside at night and stretched out my arm as far as I can, my thumb nail would cover up enough sky to hold at least a dozen XDF pictures.
I don't think I've ever felt so small before or since that moment.
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I get how you feel, it's jaw droppingly huge, but I don't have the feeling of being small, instead the one feeling that was prominent was "I know there is life everywhere out there" and without a doubt I still believe it.
I used to get intellectual vertigo thinking of an infinite Universe, so much so I had to think of it as a expanding sphere (and therefore finite) to settle my mind.
Which then begged the question "What's outside the sphere?".
So I don't bother any more =D
Shopped! (Score:2)
Re:Shopped! (Score:5, Informative)
So you've basically failed to understand why they're necessary for astronomers to make sense of things?
Hubble isn't up there taking photographs with a camera .. the only way to interpret the images is with the false color stuff.
The Hubble images aren't artists conceptions, but they're not straight up camera pictures either. They're the actual real things, just processed to make humans be able to understand them.
Re:Shopped! (Score:5, Insightful)
Right on - you can hear what, seven octaves?
You can _see_ less than one, and there's lots of useful information outside that range. If some fundie complains that it's all lies because it has the word 'false' in it, ask them whether they believe infrared cameras show 'real' image. Same color-mapping principles.
Best 25 Pictures as Video (Score:3)
PerkinElmer (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:PerkinElmer (Score:4, Insightful)
Time is relative. (Score:5, Funny)
Hubble only feels like 24.99996 years old.
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Isn't it the other way? 25 years on the surface of the earth would mean MORE time has passed for something that's in Earth's orbit - time slows the deeper you are in a gravity well.
So technically, Hubble more than 25 years old by now, even though on the surface of Earth, only 25 years has passed.
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Hubble is moving much faster than us. Relativity says it experiences less time, not more.
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First the lens error, and now we find it has a Pentium.
Thank You! (Score:5, Insightful)
Politicians and others jumped on the anti-Hubble bandwagon pretty quickly, and at the time it was another bad day for science in the early 90's as the SCSC(Desertron) was decommissioned.
Then the mirror was fixed... and we saw the pictures.
In all of human history, no one could have imagined that mankind would be able to peer back in time and deep into the depths of space as Hubble has allowed us to.
In all the imaginings of the earliest self aware humans, to the priests of ancient Babylon who studied the stars, to Galileo and Edwin Hubble himself, the images and knowledge that Hubble has bestowed on us are riches beyond compare.
Thank you Hubble and all who have been involved in the project.
And to think ... (Score:2)
What exactly ARE we seeing in that "flythrough?" (Score:2)
Flythrough video [youtube.com] -- I have no objection to enhanced pictures but I do want to understand exactly what I am looking at. There can't possibly be enough parallax for any traditional stereo imaging.
Where does the depth information in a video like this come from, and what has happened here--has the image been basically digitized and then completely regenerated by shifting every image pixel in it according to its distance from the virtual "camera" position?
The Hubble (Score:3, Informative)
The Sky (Score:1)