Eye in the Sky

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hubble logo

hubble over earth Designed in the 1970's and named after the American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble (11/20/1889 - 09/28/1953), who in the 1920's found galaxies beyond our Milky Way and discovered that the universe is uniformly expanding, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched April 24, 1990 by the space shuttle Discovery. At an altitude of about 353 miles (569 km), Hubble completes each orbit of Earth approximately every 97 minutes, 28 - 36 of which are spent within our planet's shadow.

During the past 10 years NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made dramatic contributions in understanding:

the atmospheres of planets
the birth, life, and death of stars
the properties of galaxies out to the farthest reaches of the universe
super massive black holes and their galactic hosts
the abundance of light and heavy elements in the universe
the age of the universe
the fate of the cosmic expansion

Some Hubble "firsts" include:

discovering that the sizes of galaxies are smaller in the distant universe

discovering young, massive star clusters formed in the collisions of galaxies
identifying absorbers of quasar light as galaxies
determining accurate distances to variable stars in the Virgo cluster of galaxies
imaging the plume resulting from the impact of comet fragments on Jupiter and of the "scars" at the impact sites
imaging jets emanating from the center of an accretion disk around a young star.

Edwin P. Hubble

After 14 years of service and discovery, the Hubble Space Telescope is in danger of being put out to pasture.

On January 16, 2004, John Grunsfeld NASA chief scientist
announced that the Hubble would not be serviced again, citing
astronaut safety as the primary reason for the decision. Many
of the most flustered responses come from the scientific ranks that
NASA is counting on to back President Bush's new strategy to send
explorers to the moon and Mars.

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Astronauts Greg Harbaugh, who performed Hubble repairs
during a pair of spacewalks in 1997 and Tom Akers part of
the spacewalking team that restored Hubble's eyesight in 1993,
favor another mission.

Maryland, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, accused NASA Administrator,
Sean O'Keefe of making a unilateral decision to let the observatory
die prematurely against the wishes of astronomers.

Because of policy and budget decisions, servicing trips by the
Shuttle have been called off, and many of the most flustered
responses come from the scientific ranks that NASA is
counting on to back President Bush's new strategy to send
explorers to the moon and Mars.

The U.S. House is weighing its own resolution in support of a
shuttle mission to Hubble. The resolution has gathered 46
Democratic and Republican co-sponsors, about a tenth of the
House. The Senate is considering a similar bipartisan measure.
Sponsors include Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland
Democrat whose state is home to the Space Telescope
Science Institute and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center,
where hundreds of Hubble astronomers and engineers work.