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Hubble's Deepest Pictures Yet
MrBook2 writes "NASA have just released the Ultra Deep Field (UDF). This image took 800 exposures and clocked in at 11.3 days (!) of exposure time. This image is deeper than the Hubble Deep Field which has yielded a vast amount of knowledge. So, why exactly was it that NASA wanted to scrap the Hubble?"
Because NASA says that it costs too much to maintain, and it's getting close to its estimated end of life date.
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
So Hubble has given us a lot of cool stuff. But the fact is, maintaining it costs money and that money could be used for new, improved projects with more up to date technology.
Huh. I was expecting a photo of Kant, Descartes and Hobbes arguing on the Moon or something.
--- Ban humanity.
If you look carefully at the top left quadrant, you can see what appears to be Captain Kirk arguing with God.
So, why exactly was it that NASA wanted to scrap the Hubble?
Because thanks to adaptive optics, it is now possible to get very close to hubble's resolution with Earth-based telescopes. Thus, it is much, much cheaper to use those ground-based scopes.
Because we don't have a really huge budget for this sort of thing, and all the money that goes into Hubble could be used on a newer, better space based scope.
So that the administration can turn NASA into a more pure multi-billion dollar yearly aerospace industry subsidy without a realistic programme or a significantly increased budget. NASA has always been an aerospace subsidy to some degree, but the Mars plan would probably double the portion of NASA's budget going directly into large aerospace companies for big ticket items, at the cost of stripping the science budgets clean.
Several extra billion dollars a year makes for a happy Boing and Lockheed, the real winners.
Braddock Gaskill
they want to redirect all available funds to manned missions. Even with the stunning success of the unmanned programs to Mars... It boggles the mind. Must be the thought of China putting men on the moon... I don't know...
It goes back to an era quite a bit earlier than the earlier deep-fields--about 400 and 800 million years after the big bang--and they are noticing quite a bit more chaos in the early universe, as the first galaxies were forming:
So, they are already seeing oddball things that they didn't see in earlier deep-field images.
The image as presented is actually a composite of two images, one taken in visible light and one taken in near-infrared. This allows the image to show details that would have normally been obscurred by dust.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
Pictures like this evoke strong and polar opposite emotions in me. On the one hand I am excited to see such beautiful images. I can't help but think there is life out there somewhere in all those galaxies (OK, maybe those really deep field galaxies are still too young to have life).
On the other hand, I am deeply depressed by these pictures because I know (to many 9s of certainty) that I shall never be able to visit these places. Seeing these galaxies makes them seem close enough to touch. Yet they remain so unreachable. SIGH!
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Uh, er, uh. No.
These images are seeing further than we've ever seen before because Hubble is using a more sensitive camera than the previous HDF. It's not because they sat on our butts for a few years and the 'horizon' expanded.
It's not broken, it's working fine. I don't know what the hell you're talking about, AFAIK ALL systems on the Hubble are working fine. The batteries are getting shot, they're the original ones.
There's equipment already built and in storage, or in process (was until the news came down) that would make the Hubble better than it ever has been, even though as it is now it's the best telescope we have in the optical range.
They want to scrap the Hubble because we need the money to maintain a space station that's nothing but a publicity stunt, and to fund research into a moon/mars mission that, much as I might wish they were real, will get scrapped as soon as the elections are over.
Also, the risk of a servicing mission is too great. Not the human risk, we're apparently perfectly willing to expend dozens of more spacewalk missions on finishing the ISS (which, again, isn't being used for what it was intended to be used for), but we can't risk one mission to work on the device which puts out more real science every week than the ISS ever has.
They are not scrapping Hubble because of cost. The NASA Administrator stated that the reason was due to "the risk to the astronauts on a Hubble mission and President Bush's plans to send humans to the moon, Mars and beyond as the reason for NASA's change of focus." In fact, the planned upgrade has been built, tested and (most importantly) PAID FOR. It's just setting there waiting to be taking to the telescope and installed.
Are you Corn Fed?
The big reason I have heard for discontinuing mantanence on the Hubble is it's orbit. If a shuttle goes out to do maintanence and is damaged, the orbit makes it impossible to reach the ISS and difficult to do anything else to save the crew.
This signiture copied from somewhere.
As I understand it, the last time the Hubble tried something like this was the Hubble Deep Field, which looked out to approximately 10% of the guesstimated age of the Universe. The full press release for the new UDF is here.
and they indicate that what we're looking at is about 400-800M years after the Big Bang.
Generally, the galaxies appear way more active than what we see locally, which is to be expected. But I--total amateur that I am--think it's a bit odd that the galaxies got slapped together so quickly. Whether it draws any of our assumptions about the Big Bang itself into question remains to be seen.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
A close friend of mine is an astronomer in Arizona and her primary means of gathering data is the Hubble. She recently accepted a position in Colorado to continue her work with Hubble data and a new instrument called COS planned to be placed on Hubble. Since NASA's announcement, though, the COS portion of the project has been put on hold and COS funding has lost about $1 million.
A bipartisan resolution was recently introduced in Congress to save the Hubble, a move highly supported by the Mars Society. I don't think NASA needs to be the sole financial basis for maintaining the Hubble, however. The telescope is valuable enough to private research facilities -- and still a viable platform for upgrades -- that the primary source of funding could come from them.
hubble has got some huge mirrors....maybe we should look into turning the to-be retired telescope into a high powered laser. we could pick off distant planets that we dont like, or perhaps when (notice i said when) we find bin laden we could use it to cook his ass from space. i guess the only question you really have to ask is: why wouldn't we want a super high powered laser floating in space?
Hi Mr. Flamebait.
It's broken, yes. It still works fine, as clearly shown by the fact that it continues to advance scientific knowledge about once a month. How many other scientific instruments can you say that about?
Say you have a limited edition car, like a DeLorian, or a McLaren F1. Even if one of these vehicles gets totalled, the owner will often choose to have it repaired because you can't get another one easily, and you may not ever be able to get another one at all.
The hubble is worth at least orbit-boosting, if not repairing. The the new telescope won't even be going up for several years after they plan to crash hubble, and we could use it to tide us over as it clearly still works 'good enough' despite being broken.
At WORST, if it breaks further, we'll have an ailing piece of junk that some group of scientists will likely kludge into doing SOMETHING useful while they're waiting for their timeslot on the new telescope. At BEST, we'll have a mostly working space telescope still chugging happily along if the new one turns out to be non-functional, which is a possibility most of the 'who fucking cares about hubble' people seem to ignore.
Random and weird software I've written.
http://savethehubble.org/
If they are willing to take the risk to finish ISS, there is no good reason not to fix Hubble.
Write your congressman.
Blaze a trail to the New World
NASA intends to eventually replace the Hubble with the James Webb Space Telescope:
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is an orbiting infrared observatory that will take the place of the Hubble Space Telescope at the end of this decade. It will study the Universe at the important but previously unobserved epoch of galaxy formation. It will peer through dust to witness the birth of stars and planetary systems similar to our own. And using JWST, scientists hope to get a better understanding of the intriguing dark matter problem. The JWST is also a key element in NASA's Origins Program. So, between the JWST and the terrestrial observatories using new adaptive optic technologies, over the long haul it makes better sense to re-allocate our scarce space resources not only on these projects, but also towards the new goals announced by GWB. Remember that Bush hardly increased NASA's budget, so they cannot afford to do everything at once.
More facts about the JWST as it stands now.
Proposed Launch Date: August 2011
Proposed Launch Vehicle: Ariane 5
Mission Duration: 5 - 10 years
Total payload mass: Approx 6200 kg, including observatory, on-orbit consumables and launch vehicle adaptor.
Diameter of primary Mirror: ~6.5 m (21.3 ft)
Clear aperture of primary Mirror: 25 m2
Primary mirror material: beryllium
Mass of primary mirror: about one-third as much as Hubble's
Focal length: TBD
Number of primary mirror segments: 18
Optical resolution: ~0.1 arc-seconds
Wavelength coverage: 0.6 - 28 microns
Size of sun shield: ~22 m x 10 m (72 ft x 33 ft)
Orbit: 1.5 million km from Earth at L2 Point
Operating Temperature: Cost: $824.8 million
Note that it is planned to launch the JWST using an Arianne rocket, which is far cheaper, and can also get the device to the L2 point. Yes, the shuttle could launch JWST into LEO (low earth orbit) but it would then have to travel up on an additional rocket. Seems like they have accounted for this and are going to use a cheaper expendable vehicle to do the job.
By current knowledge the spaceshuttle is "unsafe", because a very serious accident happened. But by current knowledge your car is "unsafe" too, because in all likelihood, very serious accidents happened with your (model/year) car too.
It's a mere matter of "acceptable risk" and "public opinion". If NASA decides the risk is "acceptable" and the "opinion" is that people would like to see Hubble repaired instead of chances reduced to 0% that there will happen an accident: Hubble will be repaired!
If one thinks of the future, with a more advanced spaceship, there will always be a risk that is accepted, and there will always be public opinion to make that risk a go or no go for launch.
I hope many people will see this picture, and wonder about the question: why not send the Space Shuttle back up now to safe Hubble, instead of waiting 10 years for who knows what ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
because they are *morons*... my wife is an astronomer and i have a lot of friends in the field. everyone seems outraged by this... it seems as if there are simple "marketing" reasons for scrapping the hubble telescope:
1. talking about a deep field image is not as entertaining for the common american as talking about a man on mars.
2. the shuttle is the weak link here. two have exploded so far. you need to service the telescope once in a while. currently nobody wants to hear the word shuttle, so why should we then service it?
not to mention that the telescope is modular and you can always install new instruments, i.e. it can live long and prosper...
what pisses me off most is that ther are several types of observation which you can *only* do from space. if hubble is scrapped, then several astronomers will be rather unhappy and unable to do their job. not to mention that hubble has provided amazing insights into space. the argument from NASA that it is too expensive to service it is BS. it's just that they are having a hard time to sell their budget in general and so they need to focus on more popular topics. now you might say: well, who cares about hubble. the new generation space telescope, james webb, is around the corner! well, it is not. first, it will sit in a lagrange point in space (cool idea!!!) which is rather far away and so impossible to service if something breaks. and at this point i would like to remind you the faith of beagle 2 as well as the problems hubble had at the beginning (mistake in mirror). how shall we fix such problems on JW? in addition, JW telescope will be launched in 2011... and we all know that realistically it wont happen till 2015. so if hubble gets trashed in 2007, what will we do? why put all cards on JW if hubble is still perfectly functioning and generating the most amazing data? makes you wonder...
as for the ultra deep image: amazing! i wonder how much it costs to use the hubble for ~ 11 days...
As far as we understand it, there is no "edge" to the universe - at least not one we're expecting to ever be able to see. The universe as we know it has been around for about 13 billion years since the big bang. During that time, light has only been able to travel a certain distance - 13 billion light years (there are some technicalities with the fact that the universe is expanding as the light is traveling, but that's the gist). So we don't expect to ever be able to see farther than that distance, and most theories predict that the universe inflates (expands really fast) early in its life and so is actually much bigger than that distance. So if there is an edge, it's so far away light hasn't had the chance to get here from there. However, we can't even see that far. Earlier in the universe's history, it was much hotter and denser. Until about 300,000 years after the big bang, it was so hot and dense that it was opaque to light - light from before that epoch isn't able to travel very far without scattering, and can't reach our eyes. We can, however, see the last light that was released from the hot, dense gas just as the universe became transparent - this is seen as the cosmic microwave background. After that, the universe was very dark and homogenous - there were no stars or galaxies, and hence nothing for us to see! This period is called the "dark ages", for obvious reasons. After some hundreds of millions of years, gravity caused gas to clump together enough to produce the first stars and galaxies. These are the earliest things (other than the microwave background) that we could hope to study in a telescope picture. Some theories suggest that these might be weird objects - supermassive stars a hundred times bigger than our sun, bizzare protogalaxies, etc. - and they'll definitely teach us a lot about how galaxies form. So it's not the "edge", but it's probably quite near the edge of what we'll ever see.
"You are attempting to access an image with an extremely high resolution. While the file size may be small, the number of pixels these images contains requires at least 113 MB of free RAM that is not being used by any other application, including your operating system.
Many computers and Web browsers will have difficulty viewing this image, which is intended mainly for high-resolution printed and digital material. The image may not appear, it may cause your Web browser to lock up, or it may crash your computer. Some Web browsers will display a "broken image" icon in response to your attempt to view the picture.
If you simply want to view this picture on screen, we recommend choosing one of the other image formats offered. If you still want to use this image, we suggest right-clicking (option-click on a Macintosh) on the following link, then choosing "Save Target As" to directly download this file to your computer. You can then try opening the file using dedicated image-viewing software. But note that few computers will be able to handle even the downloaded version of this image."
Thanks hubblesite, you guys made my day. Now when I look at my five year old system that can barely run WarCraft III, I'll remember that it's one of the few computers in the world able to handle this image. ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Well, duh; first off, we're dealing with digital photography. There is no 'real/true colour', it's all composites anyway. Secondly, if you where to see only the visible light spectrum, there wouldn't be much to see.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
The one problem with that is that the JWST is an infrared and near infrared telescope. 0.6 micron = 600 nm = red light. This won't give any coverage to the rest of the optical spectrum (~380-600 nm).
Amen to that.
Really really glad I got out of the states for a while, maybe longer.
None of my money went to the war crime of dispersing one micron depleted uranium mixed in with transuranics (military waste stream) in the bunker busters used on urban targets. I have 4 friends who saw the childrens oncology wards in Basra in the mid 1990's as the wave of childrens kidney cancers and certain specific leukemias started popping up.
Five six years from now there will be a new wave of childrens cancers in Iraq. (Also Kosovo and Afghanistan.)
Other friends of mine just got back from Iraq via Christian Peacemakers team. Bechtel is building five huge military bases and probably building it halfway decent. However their contract to rebuild and renovate schools can only be characterized as theft.
No money for Hubbell but lots of money for Bechtel and Halliburton.
It was really really nice to send my tax dollars to Canada, where they need bake sales to help finance their military.
Shalom,
And that's about it, too. If we'd channelled all the cash that the world puts into nukes, tanks, fighter-jets, aircraft carriers etc... and instead used it to fund space exploration, or heck even undersea, we probably would be a lot farther today.
Actually, I would bet we might be further behind than today. You see, very little cutting edge tech has come out of nations like Iraq. However, Saddam has proven before he would rather annex land than develop a space program. Were we to simpley let men like Saddam continue while all our money is funneled into other programs instead of defense we would be at some point conquered by men like Saddam.
You could claim that Iraq is a small country and would not possibley be able to take over much of the world, but compare its size to Germany pre-WWII. Toss in folks like North Korea and who ever happens to support bin Laden and we have quite a few folks who would love to militarily take over the world and force their world view on everyone.
Now, you see it only takes one side to start a war. Being the biggest and strongest allows one side to end a war. I would rather be the side with the biggest and strongest guns since I know that my freedoms will be defended.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
So, why exactly was it that NASA wanted to scrap the Hubble?"
Probably because they are idiots. But has anyone else noticed that you're seeing Hubble a LOT more in the news since NASA's announcement? Methinks the scientists that operate Hubble are going for positive PR by getting lots of awesome pictures. IMHO, it's a good idea...Before people would probably ask "well, what has Hubble done lately?". Now, by making the public aware of Hubble's merit, they can generate some static for NASA.
-R
You have a short memory.
Well, his still considerably better than this AC's.
The mirror is seriously messed up. It has been corrected with a lens, but the quality is still rather less than it should have had.
And, yet, still better than anything else we have today or will have in the next 20 years. There is no Hubble replacement on the way, and while earth based scopes can replace some of its functionality, they can't replace all of it.
The James Webb scope will have a much larger mirror, much faster camera
And is an IR only telescope. It does not have the range of instruments that Hubble has. In particular, it lacks any realistic UV sensors.
could be put on an orbit to allow evacuating the shuttle crew to Fred
I'm not even going to try and guess what "Fred" is, but JW isn't going to be in an orbit allowing the shuttle to do anything with. The JW Scope is going to be stationed at the L2 point, considerably farther than where the shuttle can go. If something goes wrong with the scope -- thank you for playing, goodnight. It's unserviceable, at least by anything we have now or in the forseeable future. Damn well better not have a problem with failing gyros, mirror irregularities, or anything else. Because if it does then we've put all our eggs in one basket. By the time that JW is launched and in position (late 2010 to 2012) Hubble will be unrepairable. Unless we spend the time, money, and risk on a single shuttle mission to repair and upgrade it.
Is that most of the images get imaged processed to death. Without Kalman filtering and deconvolution algorithms they would look lame, and these algorithms can be done to images taken from Earthbound telescopes.
The high-redshift objects observations like this are intended to uncover have effectively no emission in the visible band by the time their light reaches Earth. What Earthbound telescope did you have in mind to produce this high-redshift infrared imaging?
For press release images, it is true that they are not all that explicit about the details of the image processing. However, you are absolutely wrong that an image of this quality could be produced by a ground-based telescope. The atmosphere blurs out the light from distant objects and blocks some kinds of light either partially or completely. Sure we apply some image processing routines to the images, but fundamentally there is more information contained in a Hubble image like this than there is in a ground-based image taken by the most powerful telescope on Earth (Keck). On the other hand, there are some things that Keck can do that Hubble can't.
I don't know why some /.'ers seem to think that Hubble is easily replaceable. It isn't. When Hubble's mission ends, some types of observations will be impossible to make with other current instruments.
You can argue all you please about how Hubble is out-of-date and needs cancellation, but the real experts will disagree with you. Astronomers are quite irate about the Hubble's cancellation, and rightly so. Politicians should not dictate how NASA spends its paltry budget - and doubly so in an election year when your poll numbers are looking grim.
Sean O'Keefe was picked for the head of NASA precisely because he has a reputation as a budget cutter. The man knows *nothing* about space science.
But don't take my word for this. The American Astronomical Society - an organization that includes essentially all the professional astronomers in America, and rarely if ever takes a political stand - released a statement pleading to reconsider the cancellation:
AAS's cancellation statement
I believe there's a statement from the UK's Royal Astronomical Society there, too.
Oh, come on! The Shuttles are hardly "deathtraps"!
Before the Columbia accident, the estimated critical failure rate for Shuttle missions was 2%. The CAIB revised this, to 2%. Yes, that's right, their investigation found that the previous failure estimates were correct. In other words, our understanding of the danger inherent in shuttle missions has not changed at all since before the accident, only our willingness to face the danger has changed.
Why? I don't know. There's no shortage of astronauts willing to take the same risks they've always taken, and fly another HST servicing mission. They recognize the benefits in keeping the greatest scientific instrument we've ever produced healthy. Too bad NASA and the president do not. I sincerely hope that our lawmakers can salvage the mission.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
(2) The atmosphere blocks alot of the UV band, in particular the hydrogen 1 Lyman-alpha line. That's the brighest emission line of the most common element in the universe. With a wavelength of about 121.6nm (unredshifted), not much of it punches through the atmosphere. Check out this for a primer on what's so important about the lyman alpha line.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
1) SM4 was canceled due to cost, we believe SM4 can extend the useful life of Hubble 4 or 5 years. Not True! SM4 was canceled primarily due to safety reasons. Please remember this, SM4 was Not Canceled due to Cost!!
2) Hubble is in 100% working order. Not true! The gyros which point the telescope are slowly failing.
3) Adaptive Optics/Clever Image Processing/Ground based telescope are better than or equal to Hubble. Not completly true! AO can image single objects to better than hubble. But AO has poor field of view! For reference, the UDF images have a field of view of 180 arcseconds square. AO fails above, 30, and degrades quickly above a few. Worst, AO needs a bright star to work. There simply are not enough of these stars! I can't reference this, but experts in the field think that it will take 30 years to get to Hubble's level of performance with AO.
4) Finally, AO will never work in at UV or near/mid IR wavelengths.
I am an astronomer, and I feel it is my duty to inform the public about the benefits of Hubble. HST serves a unique roll to the community. We should all understand exactly what the risk will be to fly SM4 before we lose 4 years of Hubble!
While the Hubble is old, your argument isn't really that persuasive. The optics and superstructure of Hubble still sork fine and are as good as anything we'd put up now with the same general configuration. The aborted Hubble repair mission contains an entire new set of cameras and pointing control devices. BTW, we already spent $400 million on these and they're now gathering dust in a NASA warehouse somewhere. With that upgrade, Hubble would have been upgraded to the latest modern optics and the gyroscopes upgraded to where we'd probably be able to get 5-10 years of useful life out of it.
The James Webb telescope in certain ways is much better than Hubble because of the larger mirror but can't see in the blue and UV which is OK if you're looking at distant, redshifted stuff but useless for looking at a lot of intergalactic events including some star formation processes. Furthermore, the biggest limitation of the space telescopes is one of time - we've got scads of ground based telescopes that users can schedule time on. For space-based telescopes, we've only got a few and the waiting lists are long. If we've got two telescopes, it basically doubles the number of users and science that can be done. Things like this UDF shot are hard to do since the 11 or so days of exposure that it required are hard to get with all of the competing time requirements.
The line about Hubble being too dangerous to service are bunk as well. Although the spacewalk portions of the repair are hazardous, there has never, to my knowledge, been any sort of incident during a spacewalk. That seems to indicate that it is not devastatingly hazardous. Also, the ISS is actually much more dangerous to get to due to its higher inclination. Furthermore, the 20 or so further Shuttle flight needed to finish it have a vastly higher cumulative risk. The ISS is basically incapable of doing meaninful science at this point. The NSF did a study about 5 years ago where it pointed out that ISS was either incapable of fufilling its science objectives or that they could be done better on the ground. Since then, the science capability of ISS has been reduced even more. Basically, ISS is a $20 billion project to keep the US shuttle contractors in work and to keep Russian aerospace engineers from going to 3rd world ICBM programs. As such, it's not a bad use of money since the cost of those Russian engineers going abroad in terms of military expenditures we'd have to do 10 years from now are much higher. However, that said, I'd rather that our military welfare not step on the toes of actually getting science done.
And lastly, the most important reason to keep Hubble running is that the Webb telescope isn't operating yet. It uses an folding mirror which has never been operationally tested. It sits too far away from Earth to ever be serviced should it have a malfunction. What if the booster lofting Webb blows up? If we deorbit Hubble, we open ourselves up to having NO space based optical and near IR telescope. We should at least service Hubble to keep it running until Webb is up and running reliably.
It's a good thought, but ozone holes are really ozone depletions, and they still rule out sensitive UV measurement. That, and the holes are at the poles, and so you're limited to the amount of sky you can look at.
Dr Fish
Yes, really. You know, radio observatories have been publishing for decades images that have higher angular resolution than Hubble. In fact, the VLBA (the Very Long Baseline Array) still outperforms Hubble in terms of angular resolution. Yes, it is true that the VLT can produce images with adaptive optics that are as sharp as the Hubble's.
HOWEVER, angular resolution is not everything! Hubble gives astronomers access to areas of the electromagnetic spectrum that ground-based observatories cannot access because of the Earth's atmosphere. Also, the field of view of AO images is tiny. Read the comments to any Hubble story, and you will see this theme over and over and over again. Some of Hubble's capabilities are unique. The JWST will not duplicate many of these unique capabilities, and NO telescope on the ground or in space can duplicate some of the science made possible by Hubble.
Please read some of the posts by astronomers (including me) in this story and any other HST story. This is absolutely untrue. Yes, AO does allow ground-based astronomers to take high angular resolution images comparable to the quality of Hubble. However, the science that you can get from AO images does not compare to the science you can get out of Hubble images. AO is still too limited in many ways, and there is no way it will ever overcome some of the limitations. THE FACT IS THAT ULTRAVIOLET ASTRONOMY IS IMPOSSIBLE FROM THE GROUND! No AO telescope can observe in the UV, which Hubble can. This makes impossible many topics in Quasar research, interstellar and intergalactic medium research, hot star research, and a zillion other fields that I can't think of off the top of my head.
It was politics, ie Bush's men on mars initiative, that led to O'Keefe's decision to cancel Hubble's servicing mission. Let's not give up now that O'Keefe is starting to feel some political pressure. At http://SaveHubble.org we are working on polling all of congress. How about some of you slashdot readers give us a hand contacting them?
Senator Barbara Mikulski is also leading some efforts in the Senate as well as a Maryland Delegation, and has a response from O'Keefe.
On the house side we have picked up 5 more co-sponsors.
Ehlers
Markey
Inslee
Cummings Jim Moran
http://SaveHubble.org could use some help with our efforts to poll all of congress on the Hubble issue!