Category Archives: hst news

The Lazarus Telescope

I have to hand it to the folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute. They’ve gone and done it again—bringing a critical part of the system back online after a wild few days of diagnosis. The Advanced Camera for Surveys (one of the telescope’s main “eyes” on the sky) suffered a power supply problem. They took it offline to avoid damage, did some quick tests, and managed to bring it all back late last week.

This episode brought back some memories of the first “fix” the telescope faced. Back when I was first in graduate school, HST had just been launched and scientists were eagerly awaiting the first views through its portals. The bad news of spherical aberration was terrifying, especially considering how much we’d spent on the thing, and how many peoples’ careers were entwined with the instruments onboard (including my advisor’s!).

HST on orbit
HST on orbit

Now it’s 16 years later and this venerable telescope is up there still ticking after a few refurbishment and repair missions, and cranking out incredibly great science. My first well-received book (Hubble Vision, now out of print in both editions, but I know you can still find it at Amazon) dealt with the technical issues and also the science as it started coming in.

HST left behind the “techno-flop” label a long time ago. I was glad to see those terrible times end because most of us who were on the teams or knew people on the teams knew that the scope could be made to work. It took a lot of ingenuity and sweat, but it got done.

A chart of HSTs targets. Solar system objects are shown as yellow dots; stars are blue; star clusters are orange; nebulae are green; galaxies are red; galaxy clusters are pink; and other targets such as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey are the white dots.
A chart of HST's targets. Solar system objects are shown as yellow dots; stars are blue; star clusters are orange; nebulae are green; galaxies are red; galaxy clusters are pink; and other targets such as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey are the white dots.

I was intrigued to see a chart of where HST has looked in the sky during its years on orbit. It seems to have looked literally in nearly every direction, and out to the most distant reaches of the observable universe. It has made more than 700,000 exposures and looked at more than 22,000 targets.

Despite the accomplishments, HST isn’t out of the woods yet. It is way overdue for a refurbishing mission. This week’s successful shuttle mission may put an HST “upgrade” mission back on the books. We can only hope. This is one darned fine instrument, and it deserves to be brought back to life as often and for as long as we can do it, or until the James Webb Space Telescope is a reality.

A Great Gift

Jupiter cloud details as seen by HST
Jupiter cloud details as seen by HST

Well, yesterday was my birthday, and so the planet Jupiter (along with the Hubble Space Telescope) obligingly delivered a cool gift (not just to me, of course): a picture of a new “Great Red Spot” forming on the planet Jupiter. It turns out that, just like there’s climate change going on here on our planet, Jupiter’s giant and stormy atmosphere is undergoing change, too. Global warming on the King of the Planets, however, will raise temps there about 10 degrees F. Heat will get transferred from the equator to the south pole, although that movement of heat lessens as it reaches the latitude of the new spot. So, there’s a clue in there somewhere about the dynamics of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Stay tuned!

For more information on this story, go to the Hubble Space Telescope Jupiter Red Spot page.