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Hubble Snaps Farthest / Oldest Galaxy
starannihilator writes "Astronomers use gravitational lensing, a magnifying effect caused by the gravity / mass of galaxies, to capture images of the farthest / oldest galaxy known - from when the universe was just 750 million years old. Stories from the BBC,
Sign On San Diego, West Hawaii Today, or
Mercury News."
Hubble will stop working if it is not serviced. It is not a question of lack of users, it is things like propellant to aim it, replacement gyros for the ones wearing out spinning up there, and so on. Hubble asn't designed to work for ever - it was designed for regular service calls. So many of the bits have finite lives, and will reach the end of those lives in anothr couple of years.
I too vote for a service call. But as I understand it, NASA is not doing it on safety rather than money grounds. New safety rules say that the shuttle needs an external inspection before re-entry to avoud the problems last time. At ISS, that is is easy - look through the windows. And if a fault is found, you can wait at ISS while spares come up by rocket or another shuttle. At Hubble, you would have to do a dangerous EVA to check it. And you would have nowhere to wait for spares if you found damage that could not be repaired with on-board resources (Shuttle's endurance is about 10 days).
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Try HubbleSite - their article includes a full-res JPEG/TIFF image.
(N.b. Apologies to their webmasters/hosting company)
On an unrelated note, they also have an awesome wallpaper gallery.
I don't think it matters though.. Didn't NASA already make the decision to cut Hubble?
wired article
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
If you want to see this thing up close, here's a better link. click me
If you're refering to the James Webb telescope, a supplemental page to the one you linked says a launch date isn't scheduled until August of 2011.
The James Webb space telescope, if it is not cancelled, was intended to augment Hubble, not replace it. They detect two different things, the Webb for mostly infrared, and the Hubble for mostly short wavelengths, visible to humans. Also, it is very hard to get even a little time on the Hubble. Having both would allow for twice the exploration. The current 6 year gap between Hubble going out of service and Webb operating is not the issue at all.
And you are massively overblowing the risks involved. First of all, we have 3 space shuttles, Atlantis, Endeavour, and Discovery. How do we risk one and a half space shuttles? The only thing that makes it 'riskier' than going to the ISS, is that you can't go from Hubble to the ISS. This is not exactly a suicide mission. And I bet the astronauts would be more than willing to go.
It would only cost 500 million to service the Hubble. Allowing the Hubble to burn up in the atmosphere would waste the billions that we've already invested in it.
We have 2 space shuttles. We've lost two recently.
Is 18 years ago "recently"? And why are there multiple posts claiming that the US has only two shuttles, when it has three ("Endeavour", "Atlantis" and "Discovery")? I know Americans are used to having multiples of everything but surely it should be possible to figure out how many space shuttles you have.
Another failed shuttle with a dead crew would likely lead to a dramatic toll being taken on NASA. Or possibly the end of NASA as it is known.
Uh-huh.
I would guess this is a tradeoff between resolving power and light gathering capacity. The high resolution of the Hubble was needed to observe that the two apparent galaxies were identical and therefore the same galaxy lensed by the intevening cluster. This needs the high resolution of Hubble, unaffected by the atmosphere. But with its relatively small mirror, Hubble cannot gather enougb photons for a good esposure. So you point Keck, with its 10 metre mirror, at the blur which it cannot resolve - and probably give it a longer exposure than you can get time for on the overbooked Hubble. And you get a much better spectrum. But it was Hubble which made the discovery, whaich arguably could not have been made from beneath the atmosphere.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Thanks to all those who provided updates since I posted this, when the news broke. I thought I'd add a few more: The news from Hubblesite, The Discovery Channel, Yahoo News, and from Innovations Report
While a couple of hundred million years is a reasonable timescale for a galaxy like the Milky Way, it is important to realize that galaxies typically rotate differentially and in the case of ellipticals without a single well defined rotation axis. Spiral galaxies like the Milky Way have "flat" rotation curves such that the velocities are constant no matter the radial distance, so it takes stars at larger radial distances much longer to orbit around than stars closer in. Individual stars in sprial galaxies to not all rotate together with a fixed pattern speed. Galaxy formation is a much trickier business. This particular "galaxy" is very tiny compared to to the Milky Way (think more like the Magellanic Clouds). It may just be a small galaxylet that will, in its future, merge with other similar pieces to form a larger galaxy. In such a heirarchical scenario it can be difficult to define a single time of formation. In some sense the size/mass of the galaxy and the age of the universe provide constraints to test formation models. OK, I shoulf go prepare my real lecture for today on the Doppler effect.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)