I was scrounging around on the Web reading science news earlier today and ran across an announcement that Hubble Space Telescope is back up and running and science observations are resuming (presumably starting last night (Saturday)). This is good news for all the astronomers who are lined up waiting to use the telescope. The first post-switchover image should be posted sometime in this coming week. Here’s one of HST’s greatest hits from 2007 to tide you over until the science starts flowing again. Explore!
Thousands of sparkling young stars are nestled within the giant nebula NGC 3603. This stellar jewel box is one of the most massive young star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy. It lies about 20,000 light-years away in the Carina spiral arm of our galaxy. Courtesy NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Collaboration.
Earlier today (October 15), Hubble Space Telescope’s handlers completed switching systems over to the B-side, essentially working around the failure of the A side of the science instrument command and data handling computer that stopped working a couple of weeks ago. At 6 p.m. (EDT) tonight the spacecraft began running a pre-science command load, where controllers send normal commands to control the spacecraft and resume communications satellite tracking with the telescope’s high-gain antennas.
Overlapping Galaxies 2MASX J00482185-2507365
People are working through the night to test the system. If all goes well, then HST could resume normal operations soon. The good news here is that — so far — things are looking good, especially when you consider that Side B has been sitting there waiting to be used for 18 years… and it seems to be working like a charm. Stay tuned!
And, to whet your appetite for more HST images, here’s a treat — an image of two spiral galaxies superimposed on each other as seen from our vantage point on Earth.
The background galaxy is about 780 million light-years away; the forground one is obviously closer, but they haven’t measured a distance to it yet.
These were imaged by HST’s Advanced Camera for Surveysd on September 19, 2006. Lovely!
