Why hubble was such a milestone in astronomy

Following World War II, advances in rocket technology pushed thinking on the idea further. NASA launched the first orbiting observatory, a solar instrument, in Six years later, with the Apollo program in full bloom, the agency developed plans for an orbiting observatory with a mirror 3 meters across.

But the funding was not yet ready, and so an original launch target of was destined to slip away. By the mids, astronomers went on the attack.

They lobbied members of Congress as the National Academy of Sciences produced a report seeking a space telescope as a key science objective. That launch did not occur, as the project dragged out, but in the telescope long characterized as the Large Space Telescope was rechristened the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble became a celebrated figure in the s when he was instrumental in deciphering the expansion of the universe and also helped define the cosmic distance scale.

The Milky Way was but one galaxy in a countless sea of others. Hubble died in , and his legacy lives on with the space observatory. Hubble has turned those theoretical concepts into a fascinating reality through stunning images of cosmic entities that for millennia we have not been able to even imagine.

The system would have a focal length of The optics would provide for outstanding imaging capabilities over a wide field of view. NASA contracted spacecraft construction to the aerospace company Lockheed and the construction of the optics, tube assembly, and guidance sensors to Perkin-Elmer. Eastman Kodak was contracted to build a backup mirror. In , in Danbury, Connecticut, the engineering staff at Perkin-Elmer commenced work on the optics and finished the primary mirror some two years later.

Polishing the mirror became a lengthy exercise that ran overbudget and overtime, resulting in frequent clashes between the company and NASA. The launch went without a hitch. And then, over the ensuing weeks, came stunned shock. The triumphant launch into space of the first otherworldly observatory morphed into a disaster.

Moreover, workers had misread simple tests that could have flagged the problem. The entire astronomy world was stunned, and Hubble was the biggest flop in the history of the business. Suddenly, not only had NASA failed to expand our view of the cosmos, but it also became the butt of a series of cultural jokes as a synonym for simple incompetence.

But the story was not over. NASA had established a schedule of servicing missions for Hubble, which would be needed to maintain the telescope — to tweak, swap, and upgrade instruments over time. During a day mission near the end of , astronauts employing the shuttle Endeavour installed COSTAR along with other equipment, including the Wide-Field and Planetary Camera 2, gyroscopes, and solar panels.

Each change was designed to fix or idealize all systems such that Hubble would operate as well as was originally intended, or even better.

Subsequent servicing missions in , , , and kept the telescope operating efficiently and upgraded or replaced certain instruments. By the first days of January , the crisis had been surmounted and Hubble was open for business. Its first director was the Italian-American astrophysicist Riccardo Giacconi, who later won the Nobel Prize in physics for his pioneering research in X-ray astronomy.

As is the case with most science projects, astronomers apply to use the Hubble Space Telescope, and a review board of scientists at STScI weigh in on the relative merits, approving or denying time to be granted on the orbiting eyes in space. Jupiter appears bruised after it collided with various fragments from Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.

Hubble followed unexpected and dramatic changes in Jupiter's atmosphere caused by the event. Suspended from the ceiling as if in orbit with solar panels extended, HST is the size of a school bus.

The Hubble Theater recounts the high-stakes repair mission performed by the crew of Atlantis in My Trip. Cart 0. Tickets 0. Payload Blog. Hubble Space Telescope. Published on November 3, Categories: Attractions.

The greater the distance, the larger the shift. This is because the further away an object is, the longer it takes for the light to reach us here on Earth and the more the universe has expanded in that time. The Hubble ultraviolet and optical instruments had taken images of the most distant galaxies ever seen, known as the Northern Hubble Deep Field, or NHDF, which were released in These images, however, had reached their distance limit due to the redshift, which had shifted all of the light of the most distant galaxies out of the visible and into the infrared.

The distance that light travels in one year is called a light year. These were some of the first galaxies ever created and were forming new stars at rates that were more than a thousand times the rate at which most galaxies form stars in the current universe. Although astronomers have studied star formation for decades, many questions remain. Part of the problem is that most stars are formed in clouds of molecules and dust. The longer, or redder, the wavelength of the light, the less is absorbed.

That is why sunsets, where the light must pass through long lengths of dusty air, appear red. The near infrared, however, has an even easier time passing through dust than the red optical light. NICMOS can look into star formation regions with the superior image quality of Hubble to determine the details of where the star formation occurs. A good example is the iconic Hubble image of the Eagle Nebula , also known as the pillars of creation.