Durka-Durka-Muhammed-Jihad!!
Something I saw over at LGF: the Hubble Space Telescope is getting some kick ass TLC this summer.
Hubble Overhaul to Boost Telescope's ReachIt's nice to see that something that wasn't expected to be useful after a few years is still chugging along.
When astronauts overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope this summer, they will leave behind a vastly more powerful orbital observatory to scan the universe.
Set to launch aboard NASA's shuttle Atlantis on Aug. 7, the Hubble servicing mission will be the fifth - and final - sortie to upgrade the aging space telescope.
"We're not only going up to Hubble to refurbish it, but also to expand its grasp tremendously," said Alan Stern, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate, in a recent briefing. "We expect to make the very best discoveries of the entire two-decade plus Hubble program with the new instruments to be installed."
[....]
In addition to performing vital repairs, astronauts will add two new instruments to Hubble's observation platform Wide Field Camera-3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph that will drastically boost its vision range.
"This refurbished Hubble [will be] a new telescope," said astronomer Sandra Faber of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "We estimate that at the end of this repair Hubble will be 90 times more powerful than when it was first launched."
That means that Hubble will be able to see at least 90 times more objects in deep space than it could when it was deployed in April 1990, she added.
With its ability to scan the universe at wavelengths ranging from the near-infrared, visible spectrum to the near-ultraviolet, the new Wide Field Camera-3 should allow Hubble to see objects that formed fewer than 800 million years after the beginning of the universe.
"To follow galaxy formation to times that are even earlier than this, we need a camera that can take sharp pictures efficiently at longer wavelengths," Faber said. "And that's exactly what Wide Field Camera-3 is going to do."
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|| Posted by aafxa, February 24, 2010 01:57 PM ||