We’re on to the next cto, yibai, cien, cento, hundred of Where In The Universe Challenges. You know what to do: take a look at this image and see if you can determine where in the universe this image is from; give yourself extra points if you can name the instrument responsible for the image. We’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.
UPDATE: The answer is now posted below.
In honor of Hubble’s 20th birthday, this is an image from the venerable HST, taken shortly after the final repair mission. This is a portion of an image taken by Hubble in July 2009 of the galaxy cluster Abell 370. This is one of the very first galaxy clusters where astronomers observed the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, where the warping of space by the cluster’s gravitational field distorts the light from galaxies lying far behind it. So, the background galaxies appear stretched, and the image also includes as arcs and streaks. This image was taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys. You can see a larger version and more info at the HubbleSite.
Atlantis during a midnight rollout towards its scheduled last flight. Credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe Today.
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What a beautiful shot! Universe Today photographer Alan Walters had the opportunity to be inside the Vehicle Assembly Building early this morning (12 am EDT) as space shuttle Atlantis began her slow crawl to launchpad 39A, in what is scheduled to be her last flight. If everything goes as planned, STS-132 will launch on May 14 at 2:19 p.m. EDT (6:19 GMT). While Alan had a great view from inside the VAB (see more below), he wasn’t the only one with a unique vantage point. The six-member crew of STS-132 got to ride along on the crawler-transporter during the 6-miles trek to the pad. “Riding the crawler last night was absolutely fantastic,” said commander Ken Ham. He said the crawler, powered by destroyer engines, reminded him of a Navy ship even though it moves across gravel instead of rolling waves. “It is incredible to see that battleship on the ground.”
See more positively stunning rollout images from Alan, below.
Atlantis in the VAB before rollout. Credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayAnother great shot of Atlantis in the VAB. Credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayYes, people really are that small compared to the shuttle crawler! Credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayAtlantis out the door of the VAB. Credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayBeautiful night-time view of the VAB, reflecting in the water. Credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayAtlantis' reflection in the water. Credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayAtlantis at the pad early on April 22, 2010. Credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayAtlantis at the pad. Credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe TodayThe crew of STS-132 ready for the TCDT test. Credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe Today
The crew of STS-132 was at the pad early this morning, getting ready to conduct the Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test, a simulation of the countdown and other events to prepare the crew for launch. The crew includes, (L-R) Commander Ken Ham, Pilot Tony Antonelli, Mission Specialists Garrett Reisman and Michael Good, and Mission Specialists Steve Bowen and Piers Sellers.
Stay tuned for more great images by Alan Walters from upcoming events and launches from KSC.
ISS with shuttle Discovery docked on April 8, 2010. Credit: Ted Judah
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This has to be one of the clearest close-up shots of the International Space Station ever taken from the ground! Plus it has the added bonus of having space shuttle Discovery docked to the station. Ted Judah, who lives in northern California captured this image — one of 150 he took during the an ISS pass over his observatory during the recent STS-131 mission. Here’s Ted’s description:
The ISS came into the morning light over the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of northern California and was tracking north-east as it passed directly over my sea-level observatory. I was lucky there was no fog. I have a Canon 30D SLR and Celestron 11″ Schmidt-Cassagrain on an equatorial mount. I track manually and use my precisely-aligned finderscope to aim – when the ISS is in the crosshairs I shoot like crazy. Of the 150 shots I took, less than half have the ISS in frame.
Ted told me he was “stoked” to get such a clear image. Who wouldn’t be?? Nice work, Ted!
Ted is not new to trying to capture the ISS. He won one of “Phil’s Picks” (Bad Astronomer Phil Plait) in Celestron’s “Capture the Universe” contest with another image of the ISS.
Discovery, with contrails, on approach for landing. Image credit: Jen Scheer
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OK, America. Where were you and your cameras Tuesday morning?? We wanted to post pictures from anyone who captured a view of space shuttle Discovery during its cross-country swoop towards landing. We did get one description from Spokane, Washington, and the few pictures we received — while wonderful — were taken from Kennedy Space Center. This image is from Jen Scheer (a.k.a @flyingjenny), shuttle technician at KSC, who regularly takes images from the space center, including a daily sunrise — check out her Flickr page, the images are wonderful! See more pictures, below, but here’s the description of Discovery’s pass over Spokane from UT reader Derek Buckley:
“Nearly straight overhead, still with an orange glow to it but no streak. Was scanning the northern horizon and then saw it about 75 degrees above the western horizon, slightly to the north. It was moving FAST, and we probably saw it until it was about 60 degrees above the eastern horizon. Probably around 20 seconds from acquisition until it got lost in the pre-dawn light.”
See what you all missed??!! Derek said he tried to take a video but it didn’t turn out.
Addendum: It was brought to my attention that Spaceweather.com has an incredible movie taken by Dirk Ewers in Germany of Discovery heading towards landing that shows a “flare” as the sunlight suddenly hits the shuttle. Take a look!
Discovery on course for landing on April 20, 2010. Credit: Alan Walters (awaltersphoto.com) for Universe Today
Above is Universe Today photographer Alan Walter’s shot of Discovery on approach. And yes, that is a bird under the shuttle, but Alan says it is somewhat of an optical illusion, though. The bird is about a hundred yards away and the shuttle was still about three miles away.
Antennae galaxies (NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgement: B. Whitmore (STScI), James Long (ESA/Hubble)) Click for zoomable image
[/caption] Note: To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, for ten days, Universe Today will feature highlights from two year slices of the life of the Hubble, focusing on its achievements as an astronomical observatory. Today’s article looks at the period April 2006 to April 2008.
The image of the Antennae galaxies, above, released on October, 17 2006, is bitter-sweet. On the one hand it’s a stunning image, even more spectacular than the one taken nine years earlier with WFPC2; on the other the star instrument which took it, Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), failed first in July 2006, and again in January 2007. On top of that, one by one the Hubble’s gyroscopes started to fail, and its batteries too. In October 2006 the new NASA Administrator, Mike Griffin, had given the go-ahead for one last Space Shuttle mission to the Hubble, for a final servicing. With failure following failure, the servicing mission become more and more complex, and it was hard to maintain optimism in the future of Hubble.
The ACS’ failure came after it had completed its part of the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), which was a coordinated project involving many of the world’s leading observatories, both on the ground and in space (a bit like GOODS, which I covered in yesterday’s article). Among the successes of COSMOS was this 3D map of the distribution of dark matter. 3D Dark Matter distribution (Credit: NASA, ESA and R. Massey (Caltech)) Click for zoomable image
(NASA)
The way the Hubble keeps its gaze steady, during the sometimes quite long exposures of some of its instruments, is a marvel of modern engineering. Central to this intricate system is a set of sensors, called the Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS), which were designed to do science too, specifically astrometry.
The sensors aim the telescope by locking onto guide stars and measure the position of the telescope relative to the object being viewed. Adjustments based on these constant, minute measurements keep Hubble pointed precisely in the right direction. R136 in 30 Dor (Credit: NASA , John Trauger (JPL), James Westphal (CIT))
One of most interesting results from the FGS is the finding that the main star in the R136 cluster in the 30 Doradus nebula (better known as the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud) – R136a – is actually a triple (“Hubble Space Telescope Fine Guidance Sensor interferometric observations of the core of 30 Doradus“). Once upon a time the entire cluster was thought to be a single star, the most massive one ever seen; today R136a1 weighs in at ‘merely’ some 30 to 80 sols. Comet Holmes (Hubble image credit: NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (JHU Applied Physics Laboratory); ground-based image credit: A. Dyer, Alberta, Canada)
Comet Holmes is certainly one of the most memorable comets of recent times, not so much for its spectacular tail, but for its odd behavior; Hubble observed it several times Finally, Hubble’s View of Comet Holmes is the Universe Today story on this. CHXR 73 (Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Luhman (Pennsylvania State University))
One of the most difficult challenges astronomers face, in doing science, is understanding and accounting for biases. For example, how could you tell, just by examining the approximately 6,000 stars you can see with your unaided vision, that none of them are examples of the most common kind of star! The nearest, brightest red dwarfs are far too faint to see without a telescope (do you know what their names are?), and it’s no easy matter to even find these stars. And what about stars that are fainter still, stars that aren’t quite stars, brown dwarfs? The first, certain, brown dwarf was not discovered until 1995, but since then our understanding of them has improved dramatically, and Hubble’s ACS has helped greatly in that understanding (see the Universe Today article on CHXR 73: Giant Planet or Failed Star?). Supernova remnant Cas A (Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration) Click for zoomable image
Cassiopeia A, or Cas A, is undoubtedly a supernova remnant. And it also results from a rather recent supernova; but which? There’s some uncertainty, but it seems it was seen, by the astronomer Flamsteed, in 1680. The ACS image above is the most detailed optical images of Cas A; Hubble’s View of Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A. Einstein double ring (Credit: NASA, ESA, R. Gavazzi, T. Treu (UCLA, Santa Barbara), SLACS team)
With a galaxy (or cluster) positioned just so in front of a more distant galaxy (or quasar), gravitational lensing will produce an Einstein ring (or a partial ring). Several such rings had been observed prior to 2008, but the one ACS snapped – of SDSSJ0946+1006 – turned out to be a double; three galaxies lined up one behind the other (the right hand image is a highly processed version of the left hand one, with the light of the massive, foreground elliptical galaxy removed). Hubble Sees a Double Einstein Ring.
A full-disk multiwavelength extreme ultraviolet image of the sun taken by SDO on March 30, 2010. False colors trace different gas temperatures. Reds are relatively cool (about 60,000 Kelvin, or 107,540 F); blues and greens are hotter (greater than 1 million Kelvin, or 1,799,540 F). Credit: NASA
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NASA’s newest solar satellite is officially open for business and all we can say is, “Wow!” The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) released its “first light’ images on Wednesday, showing incredible views of the sun, with extreme close-ups, never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward from sunspots and high-resolution looks at solar flares across a wide range of ultraviolet wavelength.
“These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of solar research,” said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA. “SDO will change our understanding of the sun and its processes, which affect our lives and society. This mission will have a huge impact on science, similar to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope on modern astrophysics.”
SDO launched in February and has been billed as the “Crown Jewel” of NASA’s fleet of solar observatories. This technologically advanced spacecraft is able to take images of the sun every 0.75 seconds and daily send back about 1.5 terabytes of data to Earth — the equivalent of downloading 380 full-length movies every day. The following graphic compares the capabilities of SDO with other missions and resolutions.
This image compares the relative size of SDO's imagery to that of other missions. Credit: NASA
Serendipitously, shortly after the instruments opened their doors, our recently quiet Sun began to get a little more active. The video below was created from data from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, a group of four telescopes designed to photograph the sun’s surface and atmosphere. This data is from March 30, 2010, showing a wavelength band that is centered around 304. This extreme ultraviolet emission line is from singly ionized Helium, or He II, and corresponds to a temperature of about 50,000 degrees Celsius.
This movie captures only a fraction of SDO’s imaging capabilities. It shows the Sun’s magnetic field followed by only four of SDO’s 12 imaging wavebands. You’ll see an eruption, flare, and dimming (dark regions evacuated by the eruption) by observing the event in several different layers of the atmosphere. If you’re wondering why the movie doesn’t show all 12 layers at full resolution it’s because at high-res the movie would be nearly a third of a gigabyte in size.
The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager maps solar magnetic fields and looks beneath the sun’s opaque surface. HMI was undergoing a series of adjustments when it captured an eclipse of sorts. SDO’s view was partially blocked by the Earth. At the edges of the shadow, the Sun’s shape bends, due to the light’s refraction by the Earth’s atmosphere. SDO will have two “eclipse seasons” each year, when the orbit of SDO will intersect the Sun-Earth line.
For more images and a high-res version of the top image, see the SDO website.
Just remember — this is only the beginning of SDO’s mission!
The original Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (Credit NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team).
[/caption] Note: To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, for ten days, Universe Today will feature highlights from two year slices of the life of the Hubble, focusing on its achievements as an astronomical observatory. Today’s article looks at the period April 2004 to April 2006.
First, in 1995, there was the Hubble Deep Field (HDF). Then, in 1998, the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S). With the new Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard, and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer (NICMOS) continuing to work well, the Hubble took a new, even deeper, image. And what was it called? Why, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) of course! The total exposure was approximately a million seconds, and the observations were made in late 2003 and early 2004 (Earliest Star Forming Galaxies Found is Universe Today’s first story on it). Hundreds of scientific papers have been published using data from these observations (and others; a lot of time on major ground-based telescopes has also been devoted to these fields).
In its more than a decade of operation, the Hubble’s main astronomical instruments worked well. Sure, they needed various repairs and were upgraded in one way or another during the four servicing missions to date (remember that 3 was split into two, 3A and 3B), but none failed completely. Well, in August 2004 STIS (the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) did.This intensified the gloom created earlier in the year when NASA Director announced that there would be no more Space Shuttle missions to the Hubble, and his announcements about possible robotic missions left space and astronomy fans cold.
In April 2006, Hubble turned 16; would you have chosen M82 as a ‘sweet sixteen’ snap to put in your album? Universe Today did! M82 (Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage TeamSTScI/AURA). Acknowledgment: J. Gallagher (University of Wisconsin), M. Mountain (STScI), P. Puxley (NSF)) Click for a zoomable image
GOODS (South; Credit: GOODS team)
One of the biggest challenges in astronomy today is working out how galaxies formed and evolved. In turn this involves understanding the role of star formation (and its rates), how supermassive black holes accrete matter and create jets, and how dark matter structures form. One powerful way to get at least some answers to the many questions is to point the world’s most powerful telescopes at the same, small, patch of sky for a very long time. Choosing the patch of sky to stare at isn’t easy; for example, ideally you want a ‘hole’ in the Milky Way’s hydrogen, to let you see as clearly as possible in the soft x-ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The GOODS team, comprising dozens of astronomers from many institutions, chose two fields, one in the north (centered on the Hubble Deep Field) and one in the south (centered on the Chandra Deep Field-South). The image above gives an idea of what one project involved; the red dots are objects whose spectra were taken (by a spectrograph called VIMOS, on one of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescopes), overlaid on an image from a ground-based telescope; the contours are the Chandra 2Ms (yes, that’s 2 million seconds) region, and the Hubble ACS GOODS-S field. Over 400 GOODS papers have been published so far, with all sorts of interesting results established. For more information, visit the STScI GOODS website and the ESO one; to get you started, “The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey: Initial Results from Optical and Near-Infrared Imaging“. ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator screenshot
I mentioned earlier – Hubble’s 20th: At Least as Good as Any Human Photographer – that astronomers have their own file format, called FITS, for astronomical data, whether images, spectra, or whatever. Well, FITS is not exactly user friendly (unless you’re an astronomer), so to make the data more accessible, a joint team from the European Space Agency, the European Southern Observatory, and NASA produced the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator, a free plug-in. Why not give it a try? Aurorae on Saturn (Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Clarke (Boston University, USA), Z. Levay (STScI)) Click for a zoomable image
Even though various space probes visit various planets (and their moons), and undertake intensive research of them, good science is still done from afar. Hubble’s studies of Saturn’s aurorae are a good example (Universe Today’s coverage here). Crab Nebula (Credit:NASA, ESA and Allison Loll/Jeff Hester (Arizona State University). Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble)) Click for a zoomable image
Hubble had taken many images of the Crab Nebula before (see Hubble at 8: So Many Discoveries, So Quickly for example), but the above was a first, in many ways. It was taken by WFPC2, and is actually 24 separate images; it is the highest resolution image of the Crab, to date (Giant Hubble Mosaic of the Crab Nebula is the Universe Today title). Orion Nebula (Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto ( Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team) Click for a zoomable image
The Orion nebula is the closest ‘star factory’, so receives intense scrutiny by astronomers. Hubble pointed all its imaging instruments at it, in 2005, for over 100 orbits. This image is an ACS mosaic (do you know what the other imaging instruments were, then? Best Orion Nebula Image Ever Taken has the answer). SDSS J1004+4112 as gravitational lens (Credit: European Space Agency, NASA, Keren Sharon (Tel-Aviv University) and Eran Ofek (CalTech)) Click for a zoomable image
The theory of general relativity predicts gravitational lensing, and this prediction was confirmed in 1919 (do you know how?). When a point source, such as a quasar, is lensed by a foreground object such as a galaxy cluster, the resulting image will have quite specific properties; for example, only an odd number of images, but one image is usually very weak and embedded deep within the light of the lensing object itself. Four images produced by SDSS J1004+4112 (the foreground cluster) had been detected before, but Hubble found the fifth (the blue circles are the quasar, the red a lensed galaxy, the yellow a supernova). Hubble’s Best Gravitational Lens is the Universe Today article on this discovery.
Apollo 13 Command and Service Module integration. Credit: NASA
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Note: To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission, for 13 days, Universe Today will feature “13 Things That Saved Apollo 13,” discussing different turning points of the mission with NASA engineer Jerry Woodfill.
The saga of the Apollo 13 accident actually began years prior to the launch of the mission. As Jim Lovell wrote in his book, “Lost Moon” the accident was “an accumulation of human errors and technical anomalies that doomed Apollo 13.” But had coincidences been just a little different Apollo 13 could have been an accident from which there was no rescue. NASA engineer Jerry Woodfill believes where Tank Two was positioned in the Service Module led to a successful rescue. “I contend that the crew would have died if the flawed O2 Tank Two had not been on the outer perimeter of the Service Module,” Woodfill said. “The position of that tank had much to do with the extent of the explosion’s damage. Had Tank One been damaged, no rescue would have been possible.”
Graphic showing the Apollo Service module interior. Credit: NASA
The oxygen tanks were specially insulated spherical tanks which held a “slush” of liquid oxygen with a fill line and heater running down the center. Tank Two used for Apollo 13 had originally been installed in Apollo 10, but was removed for modification. In what was considered a minor mishap, O2 Tank Two was accidently dropped and damaged. The two tanks were on a “shelf” in the Service Module and held in place by two bolts. During removal, inadvertently, only one bolt on the shelf was removed, the side that contained Tank Two. When the lifting fixture picked up the shelf, Tank One stayed in place while Tank Two accelerated upward, striking the fuel cell shelf overhead. It only moved about 5 cm (2 inches) but the jolt displaced a loosely fitted fill tube in Tank Two. This tank was replaced with another for Apollo 10, and the exterior was inspected. Since the interior wasn’t inspected, no one knew about the fill tube damage, and the shelf with the damaged Tank Two was installed in the Apollo 13 Service Module (SM-109) November 22, 1968.
Unfortunately there was another problem with the tank, that were it not for the fill tube damage, may not have been an issue. The oxygen tanks had originally been designed to run off the 28 volt DC power of the Command and Service modules. However, in 1965 the tanks were ordered to be refitted to also run off the 65 volt DC ground power at Kennedy Space Center. All components were upgraded to accept 65 volts except the heater thermostatic switches, which were overlooked. These switches were designed to open and turn off the heater when the tank temperature reached 26 degrees C (80 degrees F — Normal temperatures in the tank were -74 C to -174 C (-300 to -100 F.)
During pre-flight testing, Tank Two would not empty correctly, possibly due to the damaged fill line. The heaters in the tanks were normally used for very short periods to heat the interior slightly, increasing the pressure to keep the oxygen flowing. It was decided to use the heater to “boil off” the excess oxygen, requiring 8 hours of 65 volt DC power. This probably damaged the thermostatically controlled switches on the heater, designed for only 28 volts. Schematic of the oxygen tank. Credit: NASA
The Apollo 13 review board came to the conclusion that the switches welded shut, allowing the temperature within the tank to rise to over 538 degrees C (1000 degrees F). The gauges measuring the temperature inside the tank were designed to measure only to 80 F, so the extreme heating was not noticed. The high temperature emptied the tank, but also resulted in serious damage to the Teflon insulation on the electrical wires to the power fans within the tank.
When the tanks were put into the Apollo 13 spacecraft, the damaged Tank Two was placed in the exterior position.
“Because the spark which ignited the oxygen in Tank Two was located at the top of the tank,” said Woodfill, the tank acted like a cork on a Thermos bottle. Since it was on the outside perimeter, it simply blew out into space along with the 13 foot panel covering the side of the service module. The oxygen tank shelf served to isolate the explosion from the hydrogen tanks below. But had the inboard oxygen Tank One 1 exploded, likely, this would not have been the case.”
Should the flawed tank have been the inner tank, Woodfill said, its explosive force would have taken with it the sister O2 tank amplifying the force of the explosion, just as using two sticks of dynamite instead of one, the destruction would be a magnitude greater.
Image of the damaged Apollo 13 Service Module, taken by the crew. Credit: NASA
“The added explosive force would have fractured the O2 tank shelf involving the fragile hydrogen tanks below,” Woodfill explained. “The volatile hydrogen gas now having a wealth of oxygen from the overhead tanks would surely have destroyed the entire spacecraft assemblage. Of course, the crew would have immediately perished as well. There would have been no clues, no telemetry data trace to explain what had happened.”
“Oxygen Tank One was given the inboard location adjacent to the flawed tank,” Woodfill continued. “Consider the likelihood of that placement. It is one chance in two. The odds for Apollo 13’s survival were fifty percent, a flip of the coin.”
Next: Part 10: Duct Tape
Other articles from the “13 Things That Saved Apollo 13” series:
Note: To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, for ten days, Universe Today will feature highlights from two year slices of the life of the Hubble, focusing on its achievements as an astronomical observatory. Today’s article looks at the period April 2002 to April 2004.
As I mentioned yesterday, Hubble servicing mission 3B in March 2002 saw the successful replacement of the Faint Object Camera with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). Surveys, surveys, and yet more surveys; astronomers are forever spending huge amounts of time doing surveys. And from its name you’d not be wrong to guess that a great deal of ACS’ time has been devoted to surveys. Perhaps the best known – to astronomers anyway – is GOODS, which stands for the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey. It was kicked off in late 2001, and is still on-going; in addition to hundreds of hours of observations by the most powerful ground-based facilities and Hubble’s ACS, an awful lot of time on Spitzer, Chandra, XMM-Newton, and Herschel has been devoted to it (I’ll cover GOODS in more detail later; for now, here’s a link to the project’s website).
Shortly after the ACS went into operation, the world was treated to a sample of stunning images from it. My favorite is ‘the Mice’ (NGC 2676); what’s yours?
Oh, and that galaxy collision?
Space Telescope Science Institute
We imagine that the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is devoted exclusively to the Hubble, both its scientific work and its public outreach and education. Sometimes however the work goes a bit beyond that, and combines both science and outreach.
A good example of this is the video at the top of this article; Dr. Frank Summers, an STScI astrophysicist, took research simulation data from Case Western Reserve University’s Chris Mihos and Harvard University’s Lars Hernqvist and visualized it using the same software that Hollywood uses to produce blockbuster visual effects. Special care was taken so that what appears onscreen accurately reflects what was calculated in the simulation.
How good is ACS? Judge for yourself; the image of Uranus’ moons above is from ACS, compare it to the WFPC2 one, in Hubble’s 20 Years: Now We Are Six article (Universe Today’s story on this is Hubble Finds Two Small Moons Around Uranus). V838 Mon (Credit: NASA, European Space Agency and Howard Bond (STScI))
Hubble’s superb resolution, close to the theoretical best for its new instruments (and old ones, using COSTAR), gives us spectacularly detailed images (and oodles of data) for such transient events as the flare-up on the star V838 Mon, lighting up the surrounding gas and dust and giving us much better understanding of the interstellar medium. Henize 3-1475 (Credit: European Space Agency, A. Riera (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain) and P. Garcia-Lario (European Space Agency ISO Data Centre, Spain))
As you’ve no doubt already concluded, the Hubble helped our understanding of planetary nebulae greatly; but, as is always the case in an active field of science, new observations sometimes bring new questions. Such is the case of Henize 3-1475, the ‘garden sprinkler’ nebula (Puzzling Jets Seen Blasting Out from a Nebula is Universe Today’s story on this). Abell 2218 (Credit: European Space Agency, NASA, J.-P. Kneib (Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées) and R. Ellis (Caltech))
Some gravitational lenses produce images which can be analyzed using observations from ground-based telescopes. Generally, however, the Hubble produced by far the best data … and stunning images (Abell would have been astonished; he died in 1983, only a few years after the first astronomical lens was discovered, the ‘twin QSO’; it looks nothing like this).
Space shuttle Discovery made a cross-country trek over the US Tuesday morning, heading towards an absolutely beautiful landing at Kennedy Space Center 9:08 am EDT. Watch the great video above. (The crew at NASA TV/KSC TV really outdid themselves on this one!) If you saw Discovery soar over your hometown we want to know what it looked like! Did you capture images or video? Or can you give us a description? Send them to me and we’ll post a gallery. See below for track the shuttle took across the continental US.
