Hubble Space Telescope's Sixteenth Anniversary

An anonymous reader writes "This week marks the sixteenth anniversary of the launch of Hubble Space Telescope. 'To celebrate [...] NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), are releasing this image of the magnificent starburst galaxy, Messier 82 (M82). This mosaic image is the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82. The galaxy is remarkable for its bright blue disk, webs of shredded clouds, and fiery-looking plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out of its central regions.' Wired News also has some nice additional images."

Comments

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[Anonymous Coward]

Cute picture, but still nothing compares to this. It will make you feel insignificant real quick.

Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[xSauronx]

I love how my dad, a fundy christian, looks at the deep field, and says to me "and people think there isnt life elsewhere out there, in all of that, there *has* to be", and then sees me reading "the origin of species" and tells me "you know, thats just called the theory of evolution."

somehow he manages to believe in aliens halfway across the known universe, and that god created the earth and everything on it in 7 days. /rant over

Re:What kind of pisses me off...

[helioquake]

I dunno.

If I were the guy who built the original primary mirror, I wouldn't want the world to know...

There's a REALLY good book waiting to be written

[bobcardone]

About the concept, design, development, engineering, construction, deployment, repair and usage of this wonderful device.
Let's hope it takes a while before the last chapter is written...

FS M82

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you don't need more proof of His Noodliness existance than this

Re:What kind of pisses me off...

[dfjghsk]

How did this get modded up? It's completely false.

If you google now for "TRW Hubble" you'll find a whole bunch of articles mentioning that TRW was selected to build JWST, "Hubble replacement", but not too many mentioning that we did actually built the original Hubble.

So either everyone is covering up the work TRW did on Hubble, or you are wrong.. I'm going to go with the latter...

Lockheed was the primary contractor.. they produced the protective outer shroud and the support systems module, and assembled and integrated everything. Perkin-Elmer produced the mirror.

http://www.sciencepresse.qc.ca/clafleur/HST-Histor y.html
http://sm3a.gsfc.nasa.gov/messages/78.html
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/wms/findPage.do?dsp= fec&ci=14783&rsbci=5&fti=0&ti=0&sc=400