The Hubble Space Telescope

hello everybody welcome back to another brand new mega projects video this one's all about the hubble space telescope this one has been crazy requested every video someone uh not one individual person but people are posting do the hubble space telescope the problem is every time i make a video about something in space people are like nah i don't want to watch that you do quite badly so hopefully this will do okay because i have to impress today's sponsor blinkist the first hundred people to go to blinkist.com forward slash megaprojects will get one week to try it out you'll also get 25 off if you want the full membership which you probably will let's get into it shall we to coin a well-worn phrase space the final frontier oh my god i'm such a star trek nerd i love it our knowledge of what lies beyond this rock orbiting an even bigger and considerably hotter rock or well really gas is still pitiful when you think about the scale of the universe but it is growing rapidly and this is in no small part down to a certain satellite that has been orbiting the earth for the last 30 years five months and counting it is of course the hubble space telescope and my mind was just blown by the fact that it's been up there for 30 years i had no id i swear i can remember it going up double space telescope will just go by his first name from now on has been a phenomenal success on many levels the imagery it has beamed down to earth has been some of the clearest most dazzling pictures we've ever seen of the universe around us it has led to numerous breakthroughs in astrophysics and in particular to determine the rate of expansion of the universe now known as hubble's law but hubble has also done something that isn't always recorded its electrified interest in space and those wondrous images that began to emerge in the 90s set off a public relations boom when it came to astronomy suddenly we were looking at pictures so astonishing they look like they must have been designed by a computer the rich colors and spectacular patterns created naturally began to show a space in a completely different light that final frontier was changing the first mention of a possible telescope in space came almost 100 years ago a paper titled something in german that i'm not going to try and pronounce but translated is the rocket interplanetary space was published by three men one german one american and one russian hermanobus robert h goddard and constantine silikovsky obviously nothing came of it that early space travel was still quite a way off and we still had yet to destroy half the world during world war ii after the war the idea came back into fashion with the help of american astronomer lyman spitzer who wrote a paper entitled astronomical advantages of an extraterrestrial observatory these academic guys have super catchy names on their papers the two advantages he was alluding to were the angular resolution which is the smallest point of separation between two objects to appear clearly distinguishable would be much less in space than on earth an object viewed from space would only be affected by diffraction which is the resolution of an optical imaging system and not by turbulence in our atmosphere if you've ever wondered why stars twinkle i have well that's because we're viewing them through everything going on in our atmosphere in 1946 ground-based telescopes were limited to resolutions of 0.5 to 1 arc seconds of a degree an arc second is one 3600th of a degree while spitzer stated that a telescope in space would have a diffraction limited resolution of about 0.05 arc second for a telescope with a mirror 2.5 meters in diameter in short this meant it could cover much more of the sky secondly a space telescope would also be able to observe infrared and ultraviolet light both of which is heavily absorbed by our atmosphere meaning land telescopes often struggle to pick them up perhaps the true beauty of space could be fully revealed by just looking at it from outside our planet it all sounds super logical but it took more than two decades for things to really get going remember this was a point in time when we seemed to be more focused on destroying our planet through nuclear war then investigating the far reaches of space in 1965 spitzer was named head of a committee that would begin seriously exploring the scientific objectives that might come from such a telescope that's not to say that early telescopes hadn't already been launched an orbiting solar telescope had been part of the aerial one mission in 1962 by the uk however this satellite had a short life as it was disabled thanks to a high-altitude nuclear test by the united states known as starfish prime on the 9th of july 1962. i've actually made a video all about that on my other channel today i found out and i believe that was the uk's first satellite that essentially the united states nuked out of space thanks guys in 1966 nasa launched the first purpose-built telescope known a little blandly let's be honest as orbiting astronomical observatory oao this mission lasted all of three days before the batteries failed oao2 followed a few years later and proved to be much more successful than its older brother between 1968 and 1972 it sent back ultraviolet observations of stars and galaxies the likes of which had never been seen before [Music] the success of oa02 led to a widespread belief among astronomers that a large-scale telescope was vital however the us government had other ideas this was a time of the moon landings and a war in vietnam that was not only spiraling out of control but costing u.s taxpayers astronomical amounts of money the total cost of the war by the way was placed at around 168 billion dollars and that's past money that'd be about a trillion dollars today spending cuts in 1974 led to funding for the telescope program being cut but astronomers they're a bit of a hardy and determined bunch a nationwide effort to lobby the government to change its stance got underway the national academy of sciences published a report underpinning the importance of a space telescope the us senate eventually relented sort of with just half of the original budget reinstated the funding cuts led to a reduction in the size of the proposed mirror from 3 meters to 2.4 meters as well as dropping a trial satellite that would have tested many of hubble's components beforehand but the cuts also led to a new partnership and that was with the european space agency the esa would provide funding as well as instruments for the telescope solar cells and staff in return for 15 of observing time on hubble now just before we get into the rest of today's video i do want to take a moment to thank our amazing sponsor blinkist look it's not always easy to find time to sit down and read all the books you want i'm pretty busy like i make a lot of youtube videos you guys know that even on this channel it's three videos i used to read a lot i used to read a lot 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currently using the app to get the best insights need to know information look my recommendation even though i haven't actually done the blinkist version of it yet is that matthew sidebook rebel ideas there's lots of great stuff in there you'll get the key stuff from the blink um loads of whatever oh yeah factfulness that's one i've had before what else have i got on here uh the snowball warren buffett's autobiography that's a good one is it a biography or autobiography i don't even remember but i could remind myself with blankets look that's what it's all about get first hundred people to go to blinkist.com forward slash mega projects you had a week to try it out 25 percent off your membership and let's get back to the video [Music] hubble was constructed by numerous institutions in various locations the marshall space flight center msfc in alabama would design develop and construct the telescope the goddard space flight center in maryland was placed in control of the scientific instruments and ground control center for the mission american company perkinelma would design and build the optical telescope assembly ota and lockheed would build the spacecraft which would house the telescope the most difficult aspect of the entire operation and the main reason hubble went into space in 1990 rather than the early or mid-80s was the ota like most large-scale telescopes hubble is based on a richie kreton design with two hyperbolic mirrors it is a design that can provide excellent imaging over a wide area but the shapes required for such mirrors they're notoriously hard to build and test production of the ota began in 1979 with two pieces of ultra low expansion glass each 25 millimeters one inch thick between the glass was a honeycomb lattice which is a structure of graphene an allotrope of carbon where a single layer of atoms is arranged in a two-dimensional honeycomb pattern optical telescopes are normally polished to an accuracy of about a tenth of the wavelength of visible light however hubble needed an accuracy of 10 nanometers or about 1 65 of the wavelength of red light getting the ota to this point would take longer than anybody had envisioned the mirror was completed by the end of 1981 and received a thorough wash involving 9100 liters of hot deionized water the next step was to give it a reflective coating of 65 nanometers thick aluminium and a protective coating of 25 nanometers thick magnesium fluoride but this process was slipping further and further behind schedule doubts over perkinelma's competence over such a complex task began to be openly voiced the launch was pushed back to 1985-1986 with the new costs now reaching 1.175 billion dollars which is about 3 billion today as problems continued with the ota the rest of the construction was progressing smoothly although lockheed's budget went 30 over what had been estimated by the mid-1980s most of hubble was ready to go this would include a total of five scientific instruments the wide field and planetary camera wfpc used for wide images and close ups the goddard high resolution spectrograph ghrs designed to operate in ultraviolet light and the high-speed photometer hsb used to measure the brightness and polarity of rapidly varying celestial objects the faint object camera foc and the faint object spectrograph fos provided the highest spatial resolution of any cameras on hubble launch in 1986 was on the cards until the events of january 29th 1986 caused the entire space program to come to a grinding halt the challenger disaster in which all seven grew on board died was a horrifying moment that was broadcast on live television while investigations took place hubble remained pending to make things more complicated the telescope needed to be kept in a clean room that was purged constantly with nitrogen to maintain its delicate mirrors if you think something like this is expensive it absolutely is it cost around 6 million 14 million dollars today every single month but the time finally came and on april 24th 1990 oh my god the cost of that clean room for years that's insane space shuttle discovery eventually launched and the hubble space telescope was on board but this was no fairy tale for hubble within weeks it became obvious that there were serious flaws with the mirrors they were a bit blurry these had been some of the most precisely designed mirrors in history but they'd got the numbers wrong the outer perimeter was too flat by roughly 2 200 nanometers that's 1 450th of a millimeter by the way so fairly tiny however this is a really precise machine and this basically greatly reduced hubble's ability to view distant objects it was a terrible start of a hubble and some questioned whether the project would actually be abandoned the next service mission was scheduled for 1993 which meant nasa had three years to come up with a solution and their answer was brilliant in its simplicity replacing the mirrors while orbiting was entirely impractical and would have cost a small fortune instead they designed a new optical component that would go over the mirror this would have the same error as the original but in reverse and if this is sounding familiar it's how glasses work these spectacles came with the corrective optics space telescope axial replacement costar and it was launched on the 2nd of december 1993. it was successfully installed over 11 days and just like that hubble was ready to go hubble was always designed so we might better understand the universe around us so well what have we learned so far from hubble let's start with how old is the universe well we're probably never going to get a complete picture of this hubble has helped to understand the age of the universe part of its mission was to measure distances to sepia variable stars those which pulsate rapidly in more depth than we'd ever done before which would lead to a better understanding of how quickly the universe is expanding this has all led to current estimates that the universe is 13.7 billion years old give or take a little bit next up what are black holes well we're still only beginning to understand the anomalies that are black holes but hubble has been able to show us that black holes lie in the center of nearby galaxies and this is something astronomers are starting to believe might be a common trait among them next up what is around us it may sound a little obvious but hubble has enabled us to see more of the universe than we ever have in 2016 researchers using hubble announced they had found the farthest known galaxy gnz11 at an incomprehensible 32 billion light years away to put that in some kind of perspective that our human brains might understand the distance from earth to pluto is just 0.000628 light years comparing that to 32 billion i mean i just know it's absolutely massive it doesn't really help me comprehend the insane distance that is next are our predictions correct in 2015 hubble captured images of the first predicted reappearance of a supernova four images of the supernova which exploded 10 billion years ago had been seen in 2014 and scientists were able to calculate when and where a fifth would appear based on different mass models of galaxy clusters they were able to prove their theories correct with the help of hubble [Music] hubble's not going to live forever if left to its own devices will eventually be pulled into the earth's atmosphere and it will once again re-enter our world a lot less delicately that time we've recently done a video on skylab the first attempt at a space station by the united states which ended in an uncontrolled re-entry that struck fear into the heart of many because nasa just couldn't say where exactly it was going to smash into the earth but they've learned their lesson and in 2009 during its fourth service mission hubble had a soft capture mechanism scm attached to it which in theory will allow for a controlled re-entry when this will happen we don't know but current estimates say that hubble's re-entry could occur between 2028 and 2040. so just a 12-year window of possibility there at least it's a controlled entry hopefully as for a potential successor well there's nothing quite like hubble on the horizon but there are a few would-be pretenders to the throne the most natural successor is the james webb space telecom jwst a collaboration between nasa the european space agency and the canadian space agency which will operate further away from earth and hubble and is due to launch in 2021 a true 21st century design will be the large ultraviolet optical infrared surveyor with a planned 8 to 16.8 meter mirror which would be more powerful than hubble this is still currently early in development and it is hoped it will be ready sometime between 2025 and 2035. the impact that hubble has had on astronomy has been staggering over fifteen thousand papers based on hubble data have been published since it began operations and it continues to wow us with images of the universe but its reputation was severely dented in the first few years of the 1990s with hubble becoming the butt of many jokes yet the telescope came storming back and it's difficult not to look at it as one of the most important pieces of hardware that humans have ever constructed yes it came at a high cost the original estimate of 400 million 1.5 billion dollars today eventually rose to 4.7 billion or 9.3 billion today at the time of launch 20 years later the cumulative cost was thought to be over 10 billion this is a massive amount of money however that's only around 100th of what the u.s spent on the war in vietnam the new gerald r ford aircraft carrier cost nearly 40 billion dollars to build and many are questioning whether we really need those monsters anymore hubble was expensive but still pales in comparison to what our governments regularly spend money on on a day-to-day basis much of what we've learned from hubble is not exactly important to our lives i mean is it really super important that we know there's an astronomical object of an unknown type called scp-06f6 in a galaxy cluster known as cl1432.5 332.8 do we need to know that not really but now you do but the reality is the humans like looking beyond the horizon it's thrilling to find out what's out there the mysteries of the universe are often beyond our mortal comprehension but that doesn't mean we should stop trying or stop looking looking at a picture from hubble of a far-off galaxy it's easy to swoon over the colors and shapes but don't forget that something humans built can do that hubble will be remembered for centuries to come and it is our privilege to witness this extraordinary telescope in action [Music] so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do smash that like button below if you'd like to support the show and get something fantastic in return for that support check out blinkist for that free trial link below and thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 328,162

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Id: 8Z_85aSHRQs

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020