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Hubble Space Telescope: 26 Years of Cosmic Wonder

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Exploring Hubble Space Telescope’s Cosmos

Hubble Space Telescope launch.
Hubble Space Telescope on its way to orbit aboard space shuttle Discovery. Courtesy NASA.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that Hubble Space Telescope roared into space in the cargo hold of the space shuttle Discovery, but the decades have flown by since that day in 1990.  It’s still going strong and, along with its sister observatories in orbit, teaching us about the cosmos.

I remember reading about the telescope back before I decided to go back to grad school, but never dreamed it would become part of MY life. That changed when I took a job at the University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, under the tutelage of Dr. Jack Brandt (who was Co-PI of the ultraviolet-sensitive Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph onboard HST). As part of my job interview, he mentioned sort of offhandedly that if all went well I’d be working with him and the other students on his team on Hubble “stuff”.

That was in 1988. In 1990, HST was on its way, and a year or so later, I was working with the team on various aspects of dealing with our instrument. It was affected by the spherical aberration, and folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute had figured out ways to “deconvolve” the data to help get rid of the worst effects from the mirror problems.

Fast-forward 26 years, and it seems like HST has always been there and those early problems are now just a footnote in history. The telescope has been repaired and refurbished five times, and continues to crank out observations, essentially on a 24/7/365 schedule. Each week it sends back about 140 gigabytes of data, covering observations of everything from solar system objects to the most distant galaxies and other objects in the universe.

Hubble and Me, Redux

I’ve written before about my experiences with HST before, and the role it played in my life. I have a lot to thank the telescope for, including the things it has shown us. But, also, I got to meet and work with a LOT of really cool and amazing people connected to Hubble. We’re all part of an amazing army of scientists, astronauts, graduate students, technicians and others who have had something to do with the telescope over the years. My job was small — but it paid off with experiences of a lifetime. Not to mention, it was the topic of my master’s thesis!

During the first years the telescope was on orbit, I started working on a book about the scope’s scientific achievements. Together, Jack Brandt and I published three books about HST science between 1995 and 2003. Our book, Hubble Vision was the first one to focus on the science (others had focused on the political and technical problems). We published a second edition a few years later, featuring more great images and science explanations.

Based on that, I then created a series of fulldome (planetarium) shows of the same name, each focused on science delivered by HST.  The latest one, Hubble Vision 2, remains popular with the fulldome community.

My relationship with HST these days is simply to proudly report its findings and privately exult that it’s still flying and delivering great science. Long may she orbit!

My Favorite HST Targets

a Hubble Space Telescope view of the Orion Nebula.
The Orion Nebula as seen by Hubble Space Telescope. Courtesy NASA/ESA/STScI

You would think I’d have an overall favorite HST image put of the many, many that have been published over the years.   It’s tough. Each year, I see new and more fabulous images from the telescope and think, “Wow, it doesn’t get better than this”.  Then, she delivers another one… and another one.

Oh, there are some that really knock my socks off, such as any image of the Orion Nebula. Hubble has peered into the depths of Orion many times during the past 26 years, and each time it delivers another amazing view of starbirth and the possibilities of planets orbiting in the protoplanetary disks surrounding newborn stars. That’s only the nearest of the starbirth factories Hubble has studied, but it’s the one that catches my imagination the most. And don’t even get me started on the views of distant galaxies that this telescope routinely delivers. It blows my mind to think about how each of those galaxies contains worlds with life on them, life that looks back at US and wonders what wonders OUR galaxy contains.

Hubble view of the Bubble Nebula.
The Bubble Nebula, a planetary nebula imaged by Hubble Space Telescope. Courtesy NASA/ESA/STScI

And then, just when I think I’ve seen it all, the telescope delivers another knockout image and I have to reset my list. Like this one of the Bubble Nebula released in time for the 26th anniversary of the launch.

Beyond the pretty pictures, however, HST also delivers the unseen universe to us. Its data contain the ones and zeroes of ultraviolet and infrared emissions, which tell us a complete tale of what’s happening to the objects that are emitting those wavelengths of light. If you want to learn everything there is to know about an object, you have to look at it in all the light it emits — and, you should do it over a long period of time.

That’s what HST supplies for us — at least in optical, infrared, and ultraviolet. Through its eyes, we are seeing out to the most distant reaches of the universe and that’s pretty darned amazing!

Happy Birthday, Hubble Space Telescope!

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How Time Flies

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Hubble Space Telescope’s 22nd Anniversary and Me

This past week marked the 22nd anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.  It really is hard to believe all that time has passed, but the solid record of science achievements from this famous orbiting telescope is proof that even if you start out with a problematic telescope, you can still do good science. Of course, making Hubble DO that good science took squads of astronauts, ground-based technicians and scientists years of problem-solving to do.  But, they did it.

I was not quite in graduate school when Hubble went up on April 24, 1990. I’d been part of a science team at the University of Colorado for just over a year and a half, led by Dr. John C. Brandt, who was (at that time, among his many responsibilities) the co-Principal Investigator for the Goddard High-Resolution Spectrograph instrument onboard HST.  I was working on a project analyzing Comet Halley images; specifically, I was doing astrometry on images of the comet’s tail so that we could analyze how the tail was being affected by the solar wind as the comet rounded the Sun during its last close approach in 1985 and 1986.

Not long after launch, Jack came back from Goddard Space Flight Center and warned us that there could be some problems with the telescope.  I think that only a few people knew how bad the problems were, mostly because they were still analyzing the images and calibrating the telescope. But, in June 1990, the full news broke and people were devastated by the idea that HST was flawed. I know we at the university were.

But, even as early as August of that year, we were seeing images that didn’t look awful, and I knew from talking with Jack that there was good science to be had — even if it took a bit longer to analyze the images. Our instrument, however, was pretty badly affected, as was the Faint Object Spectrograph.  I started to make notes about the problems with the telescope, and paying attention to the images it was producing. I think I had some idea that I’d write a book about the project someday and I knew it would be good practice to keep notes from the early days. In the meantime, I plugged away on the Comet Halley project, which eventually got published in 1992 as the International Halley Watch Atlas of Large-Scale Phenomena (Brandt, Niedner, and Rahe, with mucho work done by me in a small-credit role).

This Hubble image of the Egg Nebula shows one of the best views to date of this brief but dramatic phase in a star’s life. This is the site of a star in its death throes. At the center of this image, and hidden in a thick cloud of dust, is the nebula’s central star. While we can’t see the star directly, four searchlight beams of light coming from it shine out through the nebula. It is thought that ring-shaped holes in the thick cocoon of dust, carved by jets coming from the star, let the beams of light emerge through the otherwise opaque cloud. The precise mechanism by which stellar jets produce these holes is not known for certain, but one possible explanation is that a binary star system, rather than a single star, exists at the center of the nebula. The onion-like layered structure of the more diffuse cloud surrounding the central cocoon is caused by periodic bursts of material being ejected from the dying star. The bursts typically occur every few hundred years.Courtesy NASA/STScI.

Well, after that one thing led to another—I studied MORE comets as part of the Ulysses Comet Watch, and  I entered graduate school and joined Jack’s GHRS team (albeit as a very junior member).  The science flowing from HST was getting better and better, and the first servicing mission proved that the telescope could be brought “up to spec”.  So, I decided to shop around the book idea, and took Jack on as a co-author.  After a false start or two, we ended up signing a contract with Cambridge University Press, and in 1995, we published Hubble Vision, which was updated a few years later. I also did a planetarium show by the same name, which has been a mainstay of my company’s repertoire ever since (read more about that show here).

I feel like I kind of grew up with Hubble, or maybe we grew up together. I feel privileged to have worked on an instrument team for HST, and to have written about it as extensively has I have.  The telescope has for me–and I hope for all people who follow astronomy exploration–expanded the horizons of cosmic understanding. And that’s a great tribute to its 22 years (and counting) legacy!

If you haven’t taken time to browse the images at Hubblesite.org, take some time to do so. The very act of exploring those pages is a voyage of exploration of the universe.

Check it out!