The Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope 1

Saturn taken by Voyager 1 in November 1980

Space photography has come a long way since Voyager 1’s launch into the Solar System in 1977.2  And while the photographs from Voyager 1 and 2 spanned across many years, they took hold of the public’s attention and imagination in a way that the Hubble Space Telescope does now. Voyager photographs were usually found in textbooks and astronomy books, but with the growth of the Internet and people’s ability to connect to it, the sheer amount of photographs of stars, planets, galaxies, nebulae, and other space objects has become accessible to more people than ever. The impact that the Hubble has had leaves little debate, as evidenced by the uproar in 2005 when repairs that were needed on the telescope were nearly scrapped because of funding.3

The Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990, making the telescope 22 years old (23 in thirteen days!), and is still servicing NASA.4, 5 A recent example is a press release from 8 days ago where the Hubble found “the furthest supernova of the type used to measure cosmic distances.”6 Some of the most memorable images taken by the Hubble that many people have seen in some format or another have been the deep field images of the universe, documenting for the first time the earliest stars and galaxies of our universe.7

Saturn's and its aurora taken by the Hubble in January 26, 2004 9

It functions much like a giant 43 foot long telescope with multiple cameras that photograph in multiple wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum for a false color image that is then converted to a mixture of visible color and false color alterations for aesthetic reasons.8 Here is a link to a summary of all of the telescope’s instruments if interested: http://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/hubble/technology/summary.html.

The Hubble raised the public’s view of NASA and space exploration as it was launched and functioning shortly following the tragedy of the Challenger disaster, and ultimately redeemed the program in many ways through its ability to appeal both through the artistic renderings of the images, as well as increased availability/access to them. The hubble is constantly updating the field of astronomy, as well as our current knowledge of topics such as weather, chemistry, and physics. By being so accessible, the public’s view of physics and chemistry has changed over the span of two decades into a more exciting method of study instead of a boring, stuffy one.

The Hubble deep field 10

However, as our technology advances it is only a matter of time until the Hubble is outdated and no longer useful. Luckily, the Hubble has paved the way for the James Webb Space Telescope (due to launch in 2018) to remedy this issue.11 I look forward to seeing the crisper images of our own solar system and even deeper images of our universe. The future changes in public opinion toward popular science will, hopefully, remain positive ones.

References

1.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HST-SM4.jpeg

2.

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

3.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=D_8gAAAAIBAJ&sjid=QHQFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1125%2C4439560

4.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html

5.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-31.html

6.

http://spacetelescope.org/news/heic1306/

7.

http://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/hubble/

8.

http://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/hubble/technology/summary.html

9.

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/solar_system/pr2005006c/

10.

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/the_universe/hubble_deep_field/pr1998041e/large_web/hires/true/

11. http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/