hubble space telescope

Opening the Hood

May 14, 2009 C.C. Petersen 1 Comment

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.

hubble space telescope

Grappling with Hubble

May 13, 2009 C.C. Petersen Leave a comment

And on to the Refurbishment!

I can never get enough of watching HST on orbit during these servicing missions. It’s so graceful-looking and majestic as it floats in orbit high above the planet.

This is a pretty ambitious servicing mission, and when the astronauts are through installing new equipment and refurbishing other parts of the telescope’s systems, HST should be good to go for plenty of years.  I’m particularly excited to see what the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (which will be installed in place of the old corrective optics installed after HST was diagnosed with spherical aberration) will show us. That instrument is the brainchild of former colleagues back at the University of Colorado. When I was a graduate student there, I worked as part of a team for another HST instrument — the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph, which came out in 1997 and was replaced by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). STIS has been in safe mode and will be worked on during this mission to bring it back to life.

Both of those instruments (GHRS and STIS) gave HST sensitivity in ultraviolet wavelengths. Some pretty exciting things give off ultraviolet radiation, and so making HST a multi-wavelength observatory was an important part of its design. The NICMOS (which has been having problems) gave HST some of its infrared capability, allowing the telescope to peer into such places as starbirth clouds. It may be restarted after this mission is complete.

This is all in addition to the “visual” instruments onboard the telescope — the Wide-field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). They provide the optical view of the universe. WFPC2 is coming out, to be replaced with Wide-field Camera 3.

So, the “grand old man” of orbital astronomy is getting a new lease on life. It’s a mission that all of us Hubble Huggers have been awaiting since 2002 — and I can’t wait to see what HST will show us next!