Hubble Telescope Space-Shattering Discoveries

so the moment arrived the end of the 50 VA we'd done everything we accomplished all of our goals all of the instruments we'd even put on the extra insulation on the outside of the telescope and to my great surprise in that moment when I gave Hubble one last little pat and a salute I wasn't sad at all I felt really happy that we'd accomplished all of our goals we'd done our job and a little bit more and we were sending Hubble off in the best shape of its entire career orbiting 375 miles above Earth is a most extraordinary scientific tool that has forever changed on knowledge of the universe the Hubble Space Telescope is one of the greatest technological achievements in human history for 20 years the world is marveled at its astonishing images of our dynamic solar system and the many wonders beyond Jupiter sized exoplanets orbiting other suns exploding stars and nebulas massive exotic galaxies these and other discoveries not only confirmed many scientific theories including the existence of mysterious dark matter and star devouring black holes but also raised new questions for scientists to ponder about the origins of the universe and the endless diversity of the cosmos since the dawn of time we've looked skyward and wondered how far away are those stars and how many are there how did this all begin are there other worlds like ours out there it was only 400 years ago a mere blink in the cosmic timeline that Galileo first observed rings and moons on our neighboring planets Saturn and Jupiter this forever dispelled the myth of earth as the center of everything modern astronomy was born as centuries past telescopes became larger and more powerful able to observe far beyond the limits of our eyes in 1924 from atop Mount Wilson California the astronomer Edwin Hubble first observed that the universe is made up of billions of galaxies extending well beyond our own Milky Way Hubble observed that distant galaxies appeared to be rapidly moving away from us using known stars to calculate distances between galaxies Hubble confirmed their retreat in 1946 the acclaimed astronomer Lyman Spitzer proposed building a large telescope to orbit the earth free of the atmospheres blurring effects it would deliver images and brilliant new clarity you always need visionaries who can look out into the future and think about what's possible and the motivation that Lyman Spitzer and others and his footsteps had was about getting above the Earth's atmosphere while Spitzer's idea was well-received by astronomers it would be more than 30 years before funding was granted to begin the design and development it took time for the technology that people had to catch up to Lyman's initial law Concepcion named in honor of Edwin Hubble the orbiting observatories construction began in 1978 with the creation of an enormous nearly 8-foot mirror to gather light from objects across the universe that's kind of the heart the soul of a telescope it's the it's the thing that collects the light without the mirror you don't have a telescope when completed the Hubble Space Telescope would contain a wide field and Planetary camera a high-resolution spectrograph high-speed photometer a faint object camera and spectrograph all capable of beaming real-time data back to earth for analysis by scientists and all continued within a spacecraft as large as a school bus and weighing more than 12 tons Hubble's journey finally began on April 24th 1990 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard space shuttle Discovery after a shuttering bone-jarring launch Hubble and it's precision instruments was gingerly placed into orbit I remember the crew talked for months leading up to the flight about what the significance of the flight was going to be there was a lot of conversation back then among the scientific community about the big bang theory and there were those who believed that Hubble would provide all the answers among the crew members we thought that Hubble would provide lots of answers but that it was probably gonna revolutionize the field of astronomy and astrophysics light from the objects it studied would be focused onto Hubble's giant mirror then converted into data for downlink through a communication satellite 260-foot microwave antennas at white sands test facility in New Mexico from there the data would be relayed to Hubble's Operations Center at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland and on to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore for dissemination to scientists worldwide now that the telescope was deployed the promised brilliance of its photography had astronomers eagerly anticipating Hubble's first images what they got were pictures rendered useless by a fuzzy halo around each of the sighted objects we expected that we would have to make adjustments to make the images as clear as as possible but as hard as we tried we could never get all of the fuzziness out of these pictures finally everybody kind of got around the table and said we've got spherical aberration and we cannot do anything on the ground to correct it well we were confident in the assessment that was given by the scientists and the engineers I always had this nagging feeling that we may have done something in our real struggle to get Hubble out of the payload Bay that had contributed to the to the problem the primary mirror had been polished perfectly but to an incorrect prescription a repair plan was needed NASA engineers focus their expertise and came up with what they believed was the solution December 1993 sts-61 astronauts delivered to Hubble a new wide field planetary camera with a set of internal mirrors that the telescope would wear like a new pair of eyeglasses when we started out on this mission sts-61 all the Faiers had not happened we have to wear redesign the mission as more things fail and they were contemplating splitting our mission up thinking we couldn't possibly get all done what we got to get done and is more Fayaz happening the miracle on the ground was getting it all done and getting it onto the shuttle on cost and schedule and in the miracle of space was for the first time ever servicing a satellite with five EDA s and having every single spacewalk go perfectly and then it all culminated what could only be called the day of vindication this time the images disappointed no one it took years but I finally breathed the dust I have relief that that I had not been one of the causes of Hubble's small the newly restored Hubble was ready to work just nine months prior to Hubble successful servicing three astronomers at California's Palomar Observatory had discovered a comet whose enormous fragments now appeared to be on a collision course with the planet Jupiter for Hubble it was a golden opportunity to watch as the gas giants atmosphere was blackened and scarred and racked in seismic waves by planet sized chunks of the comet with almost every new observation Hubble was rewriting the science books and raising new questions for astronomers over time NASA would send for more shuttle crews to service and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope in May 2009 sts-125 in its space shuttle Atlantis crew performed the fifth and final servicing mission upgrades repairs and new equipment would give Hubble a new lease on life it's just really a wonderful experience to to be there and be inside or outside of the telescope looking at it with the earth in the background working during the spacewalk is really quite a privilege so III doesn't you know those memories are the most vivid ones that I have this was mission specialist John Grunsfeld third visit to Hubble on his sixth spacewalk Grunsfeld became the last human to lay hands on the telescope so it's this synergy between the humans and the design of Hubble to be serviced that has really given a snap one Hubble Space Telescope of one observatory but many observatories each time we visit it and reinvent the telescope Hubble really is an amazing example of the way people and robotics works together in space Hubble is up there without people operating it in space every day taking these great observations and yet it benefits from having people come to it and inject new technology so it's not a twenty-year-old telescope it's got brand new technology I think it's a real lesson and one of the one of the legacy products of Hubble is that throughout this servicing series this incredible series of five servicing missions Hubble has done nothing but get immensely more powerful with Hubble our neighboring planets now reveal themselves and never-before-seen clarity giant gas planets like Uranus and Neptune they sound large and they are large but they're very far away and two ground-based telescopes they are small disks of light without a lot of detail Hubble really zooms in and shows us quite a bit of detail on those planets surrounding us we now see billions of galaxies in every shape imaginable millions of light-years across it's a single point of the sky we stand for 10 days have a single blank piece of sky no more than a drinking straw so you look up the sky look through a drinking straw and we found 10,000 galaxies in that single pinpoint of dark sky 10,000 galaxies there some of those galaxies have been around their light has taken 13 billion years to reach us Hubble's imaging of EXO planets circling nearby stars provides direct evidence of new planet systems under construction Hubble has given us new insights about how stars died and how they have worn Hubble's discovery of a supermassive black hole in the center of galaxy m84 has led astronomers to conclude that an immense black hole is at the center of most galaxies what we did was we put the spectrographic slit of this instrument down right on the core of this elliptical galaxy m84 so what we're looking for is the signature of a black hole what happens there what happens in that environment well usually what happens is there's a ring of gas in a very tight orbit around that black hole and that ring of gas is rotating very very quickly of course because the black hole mass is huge one way to recognize the presence of a black hole would be to measure its influence on the stars and gas that are that are close to it Hubble has greatly contributed to astronomers knowledge of dark energy and how this mysterious little understood phenomenon is speeding up the very same expansion of the universe discovered by Edwin Hubble decades before what everybody believed was that the universal expansion was slowing down due to gravity I mean it made sense there are no repulse that there's no anti-gravity that we know of but there is now in Hubble's twenty short years we've learned more about our universe than in the nearly four hundred since Galileo first peered into his modest telescope hubble's last servicing mission marks the telescope's new beginning more powerful than ever it will lead our exploration of the cosmos for several years to come to come to the end of that time and release Hubble and think you know everything we came to do got done made me feel really proud about the whole team the way we'd work together hopeful for the future with Hubble that everything we'd done actually worked and when they checked it out and just thinking about what Hubble could do now we've given it a new lease on life it was very rewarding not many humans get to work on things that a hundred years from now history will remember Hubble was certainly one of them the Hubble touches people not only for the science but it touches people for its aesthetics and its beauty and the people that choose what to study have done the right thing they've done an extraordinary job of not only getting great science but also the beauty of the universe four hundred years from now they'll look back and I'll say around the Hubble really did change the way we see the universe I think the scientific legacy is that textbooks have been rewritten because of Hubble I think the fact that we didn't know 20 years ago about black holes or extrasolar planets or galaxy evolution dark energy we didn't know we could measure dark matter I mean we're at a point in our history where we have now discovered we only understand 4% of the universe the rest of it is completely unknown waiting in the wings is NASA's next-generation telescope when it is launched in 2014 the James Webb Space Telescope will soar deeper into space and look even farther back in time to unexplored territory at the beginning of our universe and the Hubble has shown us if you like the peaks of the iceberg those very first galaxies the James Webb tells was gonna penetrate right into what we call these dark ages where those very first galaxies are probably lurking how to sight from us Cartman the Hubble telescope has made a remarkable journey from imagination to reality it has not only transformed the way we view the universe but also fundamentally changed how we view ourselves our place in the ever-expanding cosmos and the neverending journey before us you

Channel: SpaceRip

Views: 1,785,859

Rating: 4.690084 out of 5

Keywords: hst, space, spitzer, venus, holes, satellite, free, astronomy, revolutionary instrument, everybody's favorite telescope, moon, solar, beautiful video surveys, NASA, shattering discoveries, hole, milky, favorite telescope, discoveries of exoplanets, jupiter, hubble space, Cosmic Journeys, hubble space telescope, planets, Deep Space Mysteries, esa, sun, way, nasa, universe, telescope, cosmos, spacerip, system, incredible accomplishments, invention, hubble, black, dark energy

Id: --X9zfgZtS0

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/Weakness]

Cool Video ... plus ..is that Brent Spiner!?

[u/[deleted]]

My favorite telescope is the one I have pointed at my neighbor's bedroom window.

[u/rankao]

Hubble, Spirit, and Opportunity, always bring a little tear to my eyes.