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Astronomers around the world last weekend marked the 20th anniversary of
the launching of the iconic Hubble, NASA's first orbiting space telescope that
has revolutionized human understanding of the universe.
More than any other instrument, the Hubble has stimulated a modern-day
infatuation with deep space, beaming to Earth the most spectacular images ever
taken of faraway galaxies and the births and deaths of stars -- and along the
way helping scientists make some of the most important discoveries of our
time.
Hubble was launched aboard space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990 and
deployed into orbit the following day.
Piloting the shuttle on that historic mission was astronaut Charles Bolden,
who went on to become the US space agency's administrator last year.
In the two decades since, Hubble has enabled astronomers to peer through
the celestial curtain to set the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years
old.
"Hubble is undoubtedly one of the most recognized and successful scientific
projects in history," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science
Mission Directorate.
From its unique perch some 570 kilometers (353 miles) above Earth, the
telescope is our eye on the cosmos, snapping pictures of more than 30,000
celestial objects, some of them located on the far ends of the universe.
The quality of Hubble images is 10 times clearer than pictures from the
most powerful ground-based telescopes, because it is beyond the Earth's
atmosphere, which distorts the view of ground telescopes.
"It's that extreme clarity that gives us the feeling we've traveled out
into space to see these objects," said Jon Grunsfeld, an astronaut who did
repair work on Hubble during two shuttle missions.
"It really is our time machine."
Its successor is the James Webb Space Telescope, an infrared optimized
space observatory scheduled to be deployed in 2014.
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发表于 2016-7-10 17:42:02