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Image: Hubble telescope

Science News

Hubble’s highs and lows

Trace the space telescope's triumphs and setbacks, as described by the experts most familiar with Hubble's history.

/ 10 PHOTOS
Image: The Hubble telescope floats in space.

Hubble telescope's highs and lows

The Hubble Space Telescope has circled Earth once every 97 minutes since it was launched in 1990, peering into deep space and sending back digital postcards that have wowed the world. But it hasn't always been smooth sailing for the world's best-known eye in the sky. Click through this slideshow to learn about the space telescope's highs and lows, as described by the experts most familiar with Hubble's history.

Image: The Hubble telescope

A long road

After decades of dreaming and technical planning, and years of political debates over budgets and schedules, the shuttle Discovery released the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit on April 25, 1990. The deployment came 12 years after Congress approved funding for the telescope and four years after the Challenger explosion, which dealt a huge setback to NASA and the Hubble project. "You had to sit and wait years to do something you were about ready to do," said David Leckrone, NASA's senior project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope. "You had to postpone gratification."

This comparison image of the core of the galaxy M100 shows the dramatic improvement in Hubble Space Telescope's view of the universe. The new image was taken with the second generation Wide Field and Planetary Camera (WFPC-2) which was installed during the STS-61 Hubble Servicing Mission. The picture beautifully demonstrates that the corrective optics incorporated within the WFPC-2 compensate fully for optical aberration in Hubble's primary mirror. The new camera will allow Hubble to probe the universe with unprecedented clarity and sensitivity, and to fulfill many of the most important scientific objectives for which the telescope was originally built.

A flawed mirror on a serviceable telescope

A few months after Hubble was delivered, astronomers realized the "telescope didn't work well," Leckrone said. "It had a flaw in the optics - and that, of course, was everybody's deepest valley." But Hubble was designed to be fixed in orbit, and in 1993 astronauts installed a new camera and corrective optics that compensated for the flaws. "That was a high, high peak, maybe the highest peak in all Hubble history," Leckrone said. The fixes unlocked Hubble's full potential, as shown in this before-and-after image of the galaxy M100.

Eagle Nebula wins hearts

Even before the corrective optics were installed, "Hubble revolutionized the way we do astronomy and revolutionized the role of astronomy in culture," said David DeVorkin, a senior curator in the space history division at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The revolution kicked into high gear with the 1995 release of this image of three pillarlike structures in the Eagle Nebula, said Robert Smith, a historian of science and technology at the University of Alberta. Hubble's wildly popular images turned it into "the people's telescope," he said.

January 15, 1996: One peek into a small part of the sky, one giant leap back in time. The Hubble telescope has provided mankind's deepest, most detailed visible view of the universe. 
Representing a narrow \"keyhole\" view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the Hubble Deep Field image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime 75 feet away. Though the field is a very small sample of the heavens, it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space, because the universe, statistically, looks largely the same in all directions. Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500galaxies at various stages of evolution.

Seeing galaxies far, far away

For 10 days in December 1995, Hubble's mirror was trained on a speck of sky to gain a view on the farthest reaches of the visible universe. The Hubble Deep Field shed light on the formation of galaxies. "It really started showing the galaxies were built by accretion, from little bits to bigger bits to bigger and bigger and bigger," DeVorkin said. Smith noted that Hubble has continued to make deep field images, "but that first one shows the kind of thing that could be done. And so that was a very important event for the telescope."

January 8, 1998: Peering halfway across the universe to analyze light from exploded stars that died long before our Sun even existed, the Hubble telescope has allowed astronomers to determine that the expansion of the cosmos has not slowed since the initial impetus of the Big Bang. Thus, the universe's expansion should continue to balloon outward indefinitely.
These results are based on unprecedented distance measurements to supernovae that are so far away they allow astronomers to determine if the universe was expanding at a faster rate long ago. These images showcase three of the supernovae used in the survey. The arrows in the bottom row of pictures pinpoint these exploding stars; the top row of images shows the regions where the supernovae reside.

Hubble helps determine the age of the universe

In the late 1990s, Hubble's observations of distant supernovae led astronomers to realize that the expansion of the universe has not slowed down since the big bang. "That was the complete shock," Leckrone said. The finding helped astronomers determine that the expansion is accelerating. The Hubble observations produced an estimate of around 13 billion years for the age of the universe. Later, another space telescope, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, narrowed down that estimate to 13.7 billion years.

November 27, 2001: Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have made the first direct detection of the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system. Their unique observations demonstrate that it is possible with Hubble and other telescopes to measure the chemical makeup of alien planet atmospheres and to potentially search for the chemical markers of life beyond Earth. The planet orbits a yellow, Sun-like star called HD 209458, located 150 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.

Instrument makes discovery, then dies

In 2001, an astronomer using Hubble's spectrograph, which measures the properties of light, detected the telltale signature of sodium in the atmosphere of a planet in orbit around a distant star. This artist's rendering shows the hot Jupiterlike planet around its star, HD 209458. It was the first step down a long path that scientists hope will lead to the detection of signs of life in the atmosphere of an Earthlike planet around another star. A few weeks after the discovery, the spectrograph broke. "The timing was just awful, but at least we got the one case," Leckrone said.

Space shuttle Columbia disintegrates as it hurtles across North Texas, Saturday, Feb. 1, 2003, on its way to Florida. Free-lance photographer Robert McCullough, 61, captured this photograph from Flower Mound, Texas. ** MANDATORY CREDIT (AP Photo/ROBERT McCULLOUGH/ COPYRIGHT 2003 THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS) -- FORT WORTH OUT:  (MANDATORY CREDIT:  ROBERT McCULLOUGH/2003 THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS, NO SALES, NO MAGS, NO TV, NO INTERNET) **

Disaster strikes

On Feb. 1, 2003, the shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The tragedy came as a heavy blow to NASA, and one of the consequences was that a long-planned final service call to Hubble was canceled. The main concern was safety: Shuttle astronauts lacked a backup rescue plan should they run into trouble. "It was deep, deep depression," Leckrone said, "stacked on top of the normal depression that would come from the loss of a crew and a shuttle and the tragedy of that, that makes everybody mourn. And then to have this piled on top of it - it just didn't seem rational."

Robert Mccullough / 2003 THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
August 21, 2006: Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. This composite image shows the galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, also known as the \"bullet cluster.\" The hot gas detected by Chandra in X-rays is seen as two pink clumps in the image and contains most of the \"normal\" matter in the two clusters. The bullet-shaped clump on the right is the hot gas from one cluster, which passed through the hot gas from the other larger cluster during the collision. An optical image from Magellan and the Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxies in orange and white. The blue areas in this image show where astronomers find most of the mass in the clusters.

The dark side

Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, installed in 2002, has shown how a substance called dark matter distorts the light of distant galaxies. Astronomers combined Hubble's power with the Chandra X-ray Observatory's imagery to make this image of a collision between two galaxy clusters in 2006. "The ordinary matter (mostly hydrogen and helium gas) piles up, but the dark matter doesn't do anything except it keeps going," Leckrone said. Dark matter is the blue stuff on either side of the galaxies. Astronomers say this image ranks among the best evidence for dark matter's existence.

Course change: All systems go

Leckrone and his colleagues were not the only people upset by NASA's decision to cancel the final servicing mission to Hubble. With images such as the Pillars of Creation in mind, the public rallied to save the telescope. "I don't think it would have happened had there not been this series of spectacular images," Smith said. "We got our mission back, and so that was a high," Leckrone said. NASA drew up a backup plan that calls tor launching a second shuttle if the first shuttle experiences problems. Here, Atlantis and the potential rescue shuttle, Endeavour, stand side-by-side on their launch pads.

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