DAVID ADAMS takes a look at where it started for the Hubble Space Telescope…
|
CELESTIAL FIREWORKS: An image released for Hubble’s 25th anniversary depicting a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars called Westerlund 2, named for Swedish astronomer Bengt Westerlund who discovered the grouping in the 1960s. The cluster resides in a raucous stellar breeding ground known as Gum 29, located 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina. PICTURE: NASA |
The world’s most well-known space observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, celebrates 25 years this month. But its history goes back far longer.
The idea of a space telescope has been around for a long time – it was first proposed as far back as the 1920s.
American astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer, Jr, again proposed the idea for a space observatory in a paper published in 1946 and it was his advocacy which helped to lead NASA to approve a proposal for a large space telescope in 1969.
The project continued to gain momentum in the 1970s and the European Space Agency joined with NASA in developing the project with the US Congress approving funding for it in 1977.
The launch of the telescope – named for American astronomer Edwin Hubble – was initially scheduled for 1986 but the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger early that year led to it being postponed.
It was finally sent into the earth’s orbit aboard the space shuttle Discovery on 24th April, 1990. But all didn’t run smoothly.
Scientists found the images the telescope was sending back were all blurry and a subsequent investigation found that the curvature of the surface of the telescope’s main mirror was slightly out – a condition called “spherical aberration”.
The problem was fixed in 1993 when astronauts were able to correct the problem and the first clear images arrived back on Earth on 13th January, 1994.
Including that mission, the telescope has hosted five service and repair missions by astronauts – the last in May, 2009 – and as a result has long outlived its initial expected end of mission date of 2005.
Hubble, which is managed by NASA’s Goddard’s Space Flight Center, is expected to eventually stop working as its components degrade – it’s suggested this will take place within the next five to 10 years. A replacement and even more powerful telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is scheduled to be launched in 2018.
Hubble has opened a window to the distant universe and brought stunning images of the cosmos to earth, providing scientists with a vast range of new data to study.
SOURCES:
If you have something you’d like to know the origins of, simply send an email to [email protected].
