If you are a regular follower of this blog, then you know that last October it carried a story about the Hubble Space telescope upgrade being cancelled. (See http://sms-astro-08.blogspot.com/2008/10/hubble-time-to-say-goodbye.html)
Then of course the astronomy class is not offered again in the spring, so the blog hibernates. Well, last spring the Hubble was in fact rejuvenated- last May, shuttle astronauts did a series of repairs and upgrades and two new instruments were added. The official NASA press release can be found here.
It took three months of calibrations to get the telescope back on line, but today NASA released some of the images taken by the refurbished Hubble. Plans are to observe "Kuiper Belt objects at the fringe of our solar system; survey the birth of planets around other stars; and probe the composition and structure of extrasolar planet atmospheres; take the deepest-ever near-infrared portrait of the universe to reveal never-before-seen infant galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 500 million years old;and shed light on the behavior of dark energy, a repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate."
The picture at the top of this blog gives some idea of the amount of detail the images contain; the image below is of colored stars in a cluster actually zoomable on the Hubble site itself.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment