![]() ![]() ![]() Ever since, Hubble has shared wondrous images of deep space, leading to breakthroughs in astrophysics and space exploration. With no maintenance since 2009, the telescope’s service life may only last a few more years, but its scientific legacy will live on much longer.22 nd March 2021: Launching today, the incredible new LEGO® NASA Space Shuttle Discovery set brings the wonder of space exploration back home! Ideal for adult builders, the new set is a detailed recreation of the STS-31 mission launched in April 1990 and saw the orbiter Discovery and its five crew members deploy the Hubble Space Telescope into the cosmos. Its 1.3 million observations since 1990 have provided the basis for 15,000 published scientific papers and several surprising discoveries. Today, Hubble’s “vision” is so sharp that NASA says it’s “like seeing a pair of fireflies in Tokyo that are less than 10 feet apart from Washington, DC.”ĭespite getting off to a gut-wrenching start, Hubble went on to expand our cosmic horizons – with a little help. The final space shuttle mission to Hubble, STS-125, removed COSTAR and installed the new instruments. The telescope needs at least three working gyros in order to operate, so the failure put Hubble out of commission until December 1999, when the crew of STS-103 arrived with new gyros just in time for Christmas.īy 2009, new science instruments had been designed with corrective optics built in. Hubble had another close call in November 1999, when the fourth of its six stabilizing gyros failed. ![]() Because the universe is expanding, and the Doppler effect shifts light toward the red end of the spectrum as objects move away from us, seeing in near infrared means Hubble can look at some of the most distant – and therefore oldest, because of the time it takes light to reach Earth – objects in the universe. In 1997, the crew of STS-82 installed new instruments that would allow Hubble to make observations of objects in the near infrared spectrum. This is what Hubble images of galaxy M100 looked like before (left) and after (right) COSTAR. An updated version of WFPC also helped compensate for the blur. The contraption, called the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement, or COSTAR, took NASA three years to build and the crew of STS-61 35 hours of spacewalks to install in December 1993. But Hubble’s glasses were much more complicated, using five pairs of adjustable mirrors to help refocus the light from Hubble’s primary mirror before it reached the telescope’s science instruments. It turns out that the solution for a nearsighted telescope is the same as the solution for a nearsighted person: wear corrective lenses. The error had been made in 1981, and in all that time, no one had noticed until it was too late. Thanks to the spacing error, the curves of the mirror’s edges were a few micrometers flatter than they should have been –less than the width of a hair, but just enough to blur the light of distant galaxies. The primary mirror was supposed to gather distant light and focus it into including WFPC-1 and a spectrometer. In Hubble’s case, it took a 1.3 mm spacing error in the instrument responsible for guiding the final, fine grinding of Hubble’s 2.4 m primary mirror. ![]() It takes very little to doom a space mission. Hubble leaves the cargo bay of space shuttle Discovery, 1990. ![]()
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