Hubble Space Telescope

Background info. for those who might get confused: This is a Beat Blog. I am taking a journalism class and my news beat topic is outer space and all things pertaining to the things going on “somewhere out there” (little tribute to the “American Tail” movie for you). Enjoy!

On October 30th, the Hubble Space Telescope was up and functioning at a “perfect 10” after being offline since September. Over 50 NASA scientists and engineers must have breathed a deserved sigh of relief; they had been working around the clock trying to get the telescope up and running after the main system crashed and the telescope stopped beaming adequate images back to NASA.

On October 15th, after several days of successful “safe mode” operations, the individuals working at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland began calibrating Hubble’s science instruments and a glitch hit. So the risky quest to remotely switch to a backup data formatter began again.

The risk was if Hubble’s formatter system crashed again, it would have no backup system to rely on since it was running off of the backup system at the time. Big bummer considering since its launch in 1990 Hubble has sent hundreds of thousands of images back to Earth.

It impressed mission scientists when Hubble captured this image the day it became fully functional again. The galaxy on the right displays a clumpy, blue ring of intense star formation that was created after the galaxy on the left – nearly undisturbed – passed through it. (Interesting stuff, huh?)

Because of the telescope (which orbits the earth every 97 minutes) scientists have discovered that our universe is 13 to 14 billion years old. Hubble also discovered the existence of dark energy – a mysterious force that accelerates the expansion of the universe. Not to mention all of the different galaxies Hubble has photographed. Holy moley, there are a lot of them!

Look at these photos.

The Cat’s Eye nebula is formed from gas bubbles and high-speed jets from the outer layers of a dying star. There is a theory that the gasses are released at 1,500-year intervals, giving the nebula a layered look.

These two galaxies, located 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo, distort as their gravitational fields interact. The bigger galaxy is sucking stars, gas and dust from the smaller one.

The blue ring at Saturn’s south pole is streams of charged particles from the sun colliding with the planet’s magnetic field. The aurora, which can last for days, appears blue because of the ultraviolet camera but someone on Saturn would see red lights instead of blue.

An Atlantis shuttle mission to Hubble was scheduled on October 10th, but it was postponed because of Hubble’s failed backup formatter. The mission has been rescheduled for early 2009 – probably February if everything continues to go well. One can only hope that the mission will launch then, considering it costs $10 million for each month it is delayed.