Shuttle Atlantis Blasts Off On List Hubble Mission

The space shuttle Atlantis lifts off Monday May 11, 2009 at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Seven astronauts are beginning a 12-day mission that includes the fifth and final servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)

From Yahoo News/AP:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Space shuttle Atlantis and a crew of seven thundered away Monday on one last flight to the Hubble Space Telescope, setting off on a daring repair mission that NASA hopes will lift the celebrated observatory to new scientific heights.

Atlantis rose from its seaside pad about 2 p.m. and arced out over the Atlantic, ducking through clouds. The Hubble was directly overhead, 350 miles up.

For the first time ever, another shuttle was on a nearby launch pad, primed for a rescue mission if one is needed because of a debris strike.

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Is Hubble Worth The Upgrade Mission's Risk And Cost?

This new Hubble image of the Orion Nebula shows dense pillars of gas and dust that may be the homes of fledgling stars, and hot, young, massive stars that have emerged from their cocoons and are shaping the nebula with powerful ultraviolet light. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

From Live Science:

Years ago, you could walk into any bar and ask the crowd to name a telescope, and they'd likely respond with a Cheers-like-greeting-to-Norm, "Hubble!" Not sure why you'd want to do that, but if you want to try it today, it'll still work. No telescope has ever engaged the public imagination so effectively.

After an eye operation to fix its blurred vision in 1993, Hubble has been sending back gorgeous, scientifically priceless images that have become NASA's best publicity, the most tangible and colorful justification for a space agency that spends billions on less glamorous endeavors such as circling the Earth for decades in shuttles and the space station.

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Hubble Telescope Mission, Nasa's Most Dangerous Endeavour, Is Ready For Launch

From The Daily Mail:

Nasa is set to dispatch seven astronauts on its most dangerous ever shuttle mission as it attempts to rescue the $7 billion Hubble Space Telescope from meltdown.

Led by former US Navy fighter pilot Scott Altman, 49, a one-time stunt flier for actor Tom Cruise in the film Top Gun, the crew of Atlantis will repair and upgrade the orbiting observatory, risking a potentially deadly space-junk collision that could leave them stranded 350 miles above Earth.

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Looking For The Beginning Of Time

Replacing the Instrument: Astronauts carefully remove the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) to make room for the Cosmic Origins Seismograph (COS). NASA

From Popsci.com:

The latest -- and final -- upgrade to Hubble will study the origins of the universe.

When astronauts pay a final visit to the Hubble Space Telescope next week, one upgrade in particular will illuminate the darkness like never before -- and it involves taking out the corrective lenses that let Hubble see clearly for the past decade and a half.

The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, a fridge-sized instrument that will be installed in place of Hubble's original corrective optics set, will help astronomers learn more about the large-scale structure of the universe. Scientists hope it will help explain how stars and galaxies evolved; how the building blocks of life, like carbon and iron, came to be; how matter is distributed in the universe; and, well, what the matter is.

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April 24, 1990: Hubble Becomes Big Eye Above Sky

The Hubble Telescope's wide-field planetary camera took this image in 2007 of the "last hurrah" of a star like our sun. The white dwarf is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, which form a cocoon around the star's remaining core. Blue corresponds to helium, blue-green to oxygen, and red to nitrogen and hydrogen. Ultraviolet light makes the material glow. Image: NASA, ESA, and K. Noll (STScI)

From Wired Science:

1990: The Hubble Space Telescope is launched, beginning a new era of deep space observation that opens up the universe to prying eyes as never before.

NASA's telescope, named for American astronomer Edwin Hubble, was placed into Earth orbit by the space shuttle Discovery. Despite some early teething problems and more recent, well-publicized maintenance issues, Hubble remains a crown jewel in NASA's tiara.

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Planet Hidden In Hubble Archives

A new image processing technique reveals something not before seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image taken 11 years ago: A faint planet (arrows), the outermost of three discovered with ground-based telescopes last year around the young star HR 8799. Credit: D. Lafrenière et al., ApJ Letters

From Science News:

A new way to process images reveals an extrasolar planet that had been hiding in an 11-year-old Hubble picture

Like tiny jewels not yet uncovered, a trove of previously unknown extrasolar planets — perhaps as many as 100 — await discovery in a vast archive of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, the results of a new search technique suggest.

Using the new method, astronomers can more precisely model the amount and distribution of scattered light produced by young nearby stars suspected of spawning planets, and then subtract the light from images of those stars. Once the glare of the light from the parent stars is removed, young Jupiter-mass planets that emit faint but detectable amounts of heat may show up in images already taken by Hubble’s near-infrared camera.

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Oh, Hubble, Can This Really Be the End?

Hubble Space Telescope

From Wired Science:

The spectacular collision between two satellites on Feb. 10 could make the shuttle mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope too risky to attempt.

Before the collision, space junk problems had already upped the Hubble mission's risk of a "catastrophic impact" beyond NASA's usual limits, Nature's Geoff Brumfiel reported today, and now the problem will be worse.

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Hubble Finds Carbon Dioxide On An Extrasolar Planet

This is an artist's impression of the Jupiter-size extrasolar planet, HD 189733b, being eclipsed by its parent star. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have measured carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the planet's atmosphere. The planet is a "hot Jupiter," which is so close to its star that it completes an orbit in only 2.2 days. Credit: ESA, NASA, M. Kornmesser (ESA/Hubble), and STScI

(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star. This is an important step along the trail of finding the chemical biotracers of extraterrestrial life as we know it.

The Jupiter-sized planet, called HD 189733b, is too hot for life. But the Hubble observations are a proof-of-concept demonstration that the basic chemistry for life can be measured on planets orbiting other stars. Organic compounds can also be a by-product of life processes, and their detection on an Earth-like planet may someday provide the first evidence of life beyond Earth.

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Previous observations of HD 189733b by Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope found water vapor. Earlier this year, Hubble astronomers reported that they found methane in the planet's atmosphere.

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Hubble Captures Outstanding Views Of Mammoth Stars

From E! Science News:

The image shows a pair of colossal stars, WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the open cluster Trumpler 16. This cluster is embedded within the Carina Nebula, an immense cauldron of gas and dust that lies approximately 7500 light-years from Earth. The Carina Nebula contains several ultra-hot stars, including these two star systems and the famous blue star Eta Carinae, which has the highest luminosity yet confirmed. As well as producing incredible amounts of heat, these stars are also very bright, emitting most of their radiation in the ultraviolet and appearing blue in colour. They are so powerful that they burn through their hydrogen fuel source faster than other types of stars, leading to a "live fast, die young" lifestyle. WR 25 is the brightest, situated near the centre of the image. The neighbouring Tr16-244 is the third brightest, just to the upper left of WR 25. The second brightest, to the left of WR 25, is a low mass star located much closer to the Earth than the Carina Nebula. Stars like WR 25 and Tr16-244 are relatively rare compared to other, cooler types. They interest astronomers because they are associated with star-forming nebulae, and influence the structure and evolution of galaxies.

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Hubble Directly Observes A Planet Orbiting Another Star

This image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows the newly discovered planet, Fomalhaut b, orbiting its parent star, Fomalhaut. (Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory))

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2008) — NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star.

Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis (the Southern Fish).

Fomalhaut has been a candidate for planet hunting ever since an excess of dust was discovered around the star in the early 1980s by NASA's Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS).

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Hubble Up And Running, With A Picture To Prove It

This image from the Hubble telescope demonstrates that its wide field planetary camera 2 is working properly. NASA/ESA/M. Livio, STScI

From The New York Times:

After an electrical malfunction caused it to go dormant a month ago, the Hubble Space Telescope is back in business. But the space shuttle mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble has been pushed back again, NASA officials said Thursday.

To show this week that the orbiting eye still has the same chops as ever, astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore used Hubble’s wide-field planetary camera 2 to record this image of a pair of smoke-rings galaxies known as Arp 147.

The galaxies, about 450 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus, apparently collided in the recent cosmic past. According to Mario Livio, of the space telescope institute, one of the galaxies passed through the other, causing a circular wave, like a pebble tossed into a pond, that has now coalesced into a ring of new blue stars. The center of the impacted galaxy can be seen as a reddish blur along the bottom of a blue ring.

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Hubble Re-Opens An Eye

The Hubble telescope has helped scientists view various new galaxies and stars from space.
(AP Photo )

From ABC News:

The Hubble Space Telescope has reawakened and is taking its first pictures of the sky after a series of glitches left it idle for a full month.

Engineers successfully booted up the probe's main camera, the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2, on Saturday. The instrument, which is set to be swapped out in 2009 during the telescope's last servicing mission, is now taking its last scheduled images of the sky.

"It is a relief that everything is working well," says Rodger Doxsey, head of the Hubble mission office at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. "We did a few calibration observations, which worked fine, and then restarted science observing with it over the weekend."

Hubble has been mostly dormant since late September, when a device needed to collect and process data from the telescope's science instruments failed.

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Scientists Fixing Hubble Contend With Antiquated Computers

This full-size mock up of the Hubble Space Telescope's computer system, is where NASA astronauts train before going up to work on the telescope, and where Goddard Space Flight Center scientists test their theories about how to fix Hubble. (Photograph courtesy of NASA)

From Popular Mechanics:

NASA scientists trying to find out what went wrong during last week's repair of the Hubble Space Telescope find themselves dealing with 486 processors and other outdated computer technology. But sometimes, mission managers say, simple is good when you're out in space—as long as you know how to talk to decades-old computers.

The Hubble needs service—again. The space telescope has beamed gorgeous images of the universe down to Earth for 17 years and has undergone four servicing missions by space shuttles. A September 27 failure in the Science Data Formatter pushed back a planned fifth and final servicing mission aboard the space shuttle Atlantis from this month until February 2009. While trying to switch over some of the telescope's electrical systems to redundant backup versions remotely, the team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland hit two anomalies that caused the telescope to enter "safe mode" and stop most science operations. Goddard scientists think they have found the cause, and hope that operations will resume this weekend. But perhaps finding a few problems should come as no surprise—not only have Hubble's backup systems sat idle for 18 years, but the telescope operates with computer systems long outdated here on Earth.

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NASA To Start Long Distance Repairs On Hubble

Hubble Space Telescope is seen with ground view in this picture taken from Space Shuttle in March 2002. (NASA/Handout/Reuters)

From Yahoo News/AP:

WASHINGTON - NASA engineers say they know how to fix the broken Hubble Space Telescope: They have to wake up computer parts that have been sleeping in space for more than 18 years.

On Wednesday, NASA will start a complicated remote-control fix of a major glitch that stopped the telescope from capturing and beaming down pictures. Hubble should be able to send stunning astronomy photos back to Earth by Friday, officials said.

The abrupt failure more than two weeks ago 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 in a Tuesday teleconference.

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