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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!
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 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
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?
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.
True, but the AREN'T PLANNING ANY. The only space telescope on the drawing board is the James Webb scope, and it's an IR scope. There's nothing even in the planning stages for a replacement for Hubble.
The truth is, the Hubble is still very capable, in fact more so than when it was launched. It needs new batteries and gyros, and as long as we're there, some new science instruments, and it'll keep going happily for a long time to come yet.
If new batteries and gyros are put on board, they'll last even longer; the new ones are capable of lasting far longer than the originals.
...but you cannot do UV work from the ground, as the atmosphere almost absorbs all UV flux of astrophysical interest. Also, AO is limited to about an arcminute around bright guide stars, and cannot provide good correction for the Earth's atmosphere beyond this radius. Laser projection systems are being developed to provide all-sky coverage, but they're a hassle to run consistently.
Dr Fish
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.
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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?
Also, I have never heard NASA say that the Hubble is just old and worn out. They say it's too risky to go up for another servicing mission.
It's not too risky. They could do it if they wanted to. They'd simply have to recertify the shuttles specifically to do it, and what they're saying is that the excess cost to do that is not worth the limited science that Hubble would do in the remaining years it has left.
In other words, Hubble is too expensive to keep running. That makes it uneconomical now.
The main problem with the controversy is that there are emotions involved, and that makes for very bad decision-making. Any of the advocates for Hubble always push the emotional attachment to Hubble, rather than the simple by-the-numbers math.
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?
Because the optical is boring.
To some degree, this is true. But the UV spectrum is *very* interesting, as it can be used for, amongst other things, detecting organic compounds in distant objects. Well, guess what, the JWST doesn't cover UV, either, and neither does any other telescope currently available, since the UV is only reachable from space.
The fact is, the Hubble and JWST instruments are *complementary*. The Hubble can still do a lot of valuable science, and shutting it down for supposed budgetary reasons is just plain silly, IMHO.
The optical is boring and scientifically uninteresting? Sorry, but you're just plain wrong! Sure, maybe you can't see the most red-shifted "foo" galaxy, but with STIS (the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) we can obtain optical/near UV spectra which contain an enormous number of ionised metal transitions. This gives us a heap of information about things like the formation of the milky way, the interiors of white dwarves and many other things. Also, the oversubscription rate of hubble gives a good indication on how valuable scientists think it is.
:-) But then, what is scientifically interesting is a matter partially of opinion and partially of what's "in vogue". Ten years ago nobody cared much about stars or the solar system. Now the stellar crowd is close to finding the first stars formed in the milky way (population III stars) and the solar system kids are in big demand because they know how planets work (extra-solar planets anyone?).
Of course, I'm completely biased in that part of my Phd work is based on STIS work
As a cynical thought on JWST, don't underestimate the capacity for de-scoping the mission. It's happened already and is biting big projects (especially space-based ones) quite a bit in recent times. But maybe I'm just too pessismistic...
$AUS0.02
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.
I'd much rather see that Hubble money going into invading random countries here on Earth. Hell, don't they know that space is just a illusion by the Devil to convince us the world is more than six thousand years old?
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
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.
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.
Just FYI, there is currently no safe plan for deorbiting Hubble. It has NO retros. It steers based completely on reaction wheels which are incapable of altering the orbit, they can only repoint the scope.
So, some kind of mission to the scope is going to be necessary if it's to be safely de-orbited. And if we're going there anyway, and we have new equipment ALREADY BUILT for it, why not bolt on the de-orbit retros, and at the same time put in the new equipment and reboost it, and get another 5 years out of the old dog?
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.