Closeup of New Dark Spot on Jupiter as seen by HST

Talk about a target of opportunity!  The venerable Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been in the middle of recommissioning after the successful refurbishing mission.  Not to miss the potentially new science in the drama unfolding on Jupiter after the recent impact, Space Telescope Science Institute director Matt Mountain allocated discretionary time to a team of astronomers led by Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

The Hubble picture, taken on 23 July, is the sharpest visible-light picture taken of the feature and is Hubble’s first science observation following its repair and upgrade in May. Observations were taken with Hubble’s new camera, the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).

Hubble’s view shows a lumpiness in the debris plume left behind by the impact. This is caused by turbulence in Jupiter’s atmosphere. For scale, the spot as seen in this image is about twice the length of the whole of Europe. The object that did the nasty deed to Jupiter was probably about the size of several football fields, and the force of the explosion was thousands of times more powerful than whatever it was that created the Tunguska incident in June 1908.  That’s pretty darned powerful!  For more information about the HST images, visit here. You’ll find more images and interviews with the scientists involved.

To Get Inside

Watching the astronauts try to untighten a bolt on the grounding strap on the WFPC2 camera on the Hubble Space Telescope reminds me of watching a couple of guys work under the hood of a car.  They’ve tried the gentle ways, and now it’s time to get some  more tools and get all torquey on the bolt. It’s interesting to listen to them discuss back and forth what to do, between the two astronauts in the payload bay and the folks on the ground. Now they’ve said, “Give it your best try.”

And that’s the best you can do — same thing you’d do on the ground working on a tough problem. You find work-arounds and ways to get the job done.  Only in this case, they’re on orbit, a few hundred kilometers above Earth’s surface, moving in near-zero gravity.

If you’re not watching this mission online, you can get a 24/7 streaming video of it at SpaceVidcast.com — which

I’ve been watching all morning, and more than once I’ve marveled at the fact that I can sit here at my desk and have a space mission unfolding before my eyes on my right screen.  This is the kind of thing that we could only dream about when we got our first computers back in the 1980s. In fact, if anybody had told me all those years ago that in the new century I could simultaneously work on writing a document, while having an image open in an editing program, listen to music, make a phone call (via Skype), and watch astronauts work on my favorite space telescope, all on one computer, I probably would have said they were crazy.

But here we are, doing all those things and more — in the new century, using equipment that was, in many ways large and small, birthed in the space age for missions like the one I’m watching.  Pretty darned amazing.