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Hubble Turns 25
Taco Cowboy points out that the Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 today.
Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Currently, it is flying about 340 miles over the Earth and circling us every 97 minutes. While the telescope itself is not really much to look at, that silver bucket is pure gold for astronomers. Scientists have used that vantage point to make ground-breaking observations about planets, stars, galaxies and to reveal parts of our universe we didn't know existed. The telescope has made more than a million observations and astronomers have used Hubble data in more than 12,700 scientific papers, "making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built," according to NASA. ... NASA aims to keep Hubble operating through at least 2020 so that it can overlap with its successor. The James Webb Space Telescope is due to launch in October 2018 and begin observations in mid-2019.
NASA celebrated by releasing a new, epic image from Hubble titled "Celestial Fireworks." It is accompanied by an impressive flythrough video. Some nice galleries of Hubble images have been put together at the NY Times and Slate, but a bigger collection is available directly from the official Hubble website.
Why on Earth is PerkinElmer still in business after knowingly messing up the mirror? They only had to pay $25 million for their "mistake". How much did all the investigation, training, preparation and the actual flight to Hubble cost the tax payers?
Some things need to be said...
Right on - you can hear what, seven octaves?
You can _see_ less than one, and there's lots of useful information outside that range. If some fundie complains that it's all lies because it has the word 'false' in it, ask them whether they believe infrared cameras show 'real' image. Same color-mapping principles.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
For anyone who was paying attention at the time when it was launched, the fact that Hubble has stayed functional this long is a pretty big deal. The drama that unfolded after it was launched, with the mirror problems and subsequent corrective missions, was an amazing feat of engineering.
Politicians and others jumped on the anti-Hubble bandwagon pretty quickly, and at the time it was another bad day for science in the early 90's as the SCSC(Desertron) was decommissioned.
Then the mirror was fixed... and we saw the pictures.
In all of human history, no one could have imagined that mankind would be able to peer back in time and deep into the depths of space as Hubble has allowed us to.
In all the imaginings of the earliest self aware humans, to the priests of ancient Babylon who studied the stars, to Galileo and Edwin Hubble himself, the images and knowledge that Hubble has bestowed on us are riches beyond compare.
Thank you Hubble and all who have been involved in the project.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
To simplify, consider parallax between "now" and where earth was 6 months ago