What is the significance of the hubble telescope

Jim Wetherbee says. The images and information that the Hubble telescope has provided has led to significant progress in understanding our universe It seems every couple of years, the telescope faces challenges, whether it be breaking down or the threat of losing funding.

Image above from Hubble Heritage. Light enters the telescope and passes through the first lens, called the objective lens, and bends u Since April the Hubble telescope has been greatly appreciated by the scientific community because of everything it has done. However, the Hubble has faced many problems along its way as well.

In Hans Lippershey looked at Jupiter through a thin tube shaped object similar to a telescope. Galileo improved the telescope made by Hans in by adding a convex lens in the front. It collects light and magnifies images, and gives Astronomers the most detailed images known to man. Hubble has been at work since April 25, , and celebrated its 20th anniversary in orbit April 24, Twenty years in service, and still being the leading source for space news says a lot about Hubble's overall longevity and productiveness.

Over scientific articles have been published based on Hubble data, with some of its discoveries being so significant that NASA would have needed multiple satellite missions to accomplish the same results. Viewing the object at million years after the big bang, scientists have looked into a time shortly after the "Dark Ages," a time before the first galaxies and quasars were formed. This incredible discovery was made with the aid of a cluster of galaxies known as Abell Being as massive as it is, Abell bends and amplifies any light that passes through it, working as a natural telescope "Hubble".

The Hubble Space Telescope has become a great and valuable astronomic tool that NASA says is too costly and dangerous to keep running, a decision that may be premature. Originally planned to launch in , the Hubble Space Telescope has seen its share of problems.

I think with new technology that astronomers will be able to gather more information that can offer more insight into the world of black holes. There are many unanswered questions that could possibly lead to a better understanding of how Earth was created. It could also lead to more information on different galaxies and any similarities they may have to our own. The universe is so vast and we may never find the answers to some questions, but it is a worthy task to try and find out all we can about our existence.

Russia believed that by studying the cosmos with outer space instruments and people it would finally prove that they are the greatest and most powerful nation in the world.

To achieve this, Russia has created the Russian Federal Space Agency RFSA to research and launch missions and satellites into space to finally understand what is outside the boundaries of Earths atmosphere. It has also made America a greater and more dominant power. After the Russians have sent a satellite Sputnik 1 to measure the conditions of space, it has caused America and its citizens to worry since it sent signals in which receivers for radios and broadcasts could pick up and the unknown signals troubled people and their broadcasts.

Then, Newton selected one of these spectral colors for example, red and allowed only that color to pass through yet another small opening to a second prism. Newton watched to see what would happen when that color was refracted onto a second board.

What Newton found was that the color leaving the first prism could not be separated any further by the second prism. He concluded that white light is an assorted mixture of colors that cannot be individually changed in any way. I used the knowledge of spectrum color order to determine if a galaxy was moving toward or away from the Milky Way Galaxy.

But we'll get to that later! Building on what he had learned about light, Isaac Newton set out to remove the lenses from a telescope and search for material that would reflect light instead. He tried several different mixtures of metal, finally deciding on a ratio of six parts copper to two parts tin.

This combination was almost as bright as silver but much less expensive and not as quick to corrode. The more light the mirror reflected, Newton knew, the better view the telescope would provide of the sky.

To construct the telescope, Newton placed a curved mirror at the bottom of the tube. That mirror sent reflected light forward to a second, smaller, flat mirror. This second mirror was angled to deflect the light rays to the eyepiece. With this design, Newton decreased the length of the telescope and eliminated the problem of light refracting, since the light didn't pass through lenses. The Hubble Space Telescope is a reflecting telescope.

Even though Newton invented the reflecting telescope to study what he knew about light, by astronomers were using it to study the Universe. They found that the bigger the mirror, the more light it reflected. These scientists began to build huge telescopes again, with larger and larger mirrors that reflected more and more light. Now it was the size of the primary mirror, not the distance between lenses that described how powerful a telescope was.

In , Sir William Herschel became interested in astronomy. He combined different amounts of copper, tin, and other metals to find a mixture that improved reflection by 60 percent. The first telescope he made was seven feet long and had a 6-inch diameter mirror. It magnified what he looked at by 40 times.

Herschel could clearly see Saturn's rings with his new telescope. But if a little is good, then a lot is better, Herschel thought. Knowing that a telescope's most important quality was its ability to gather light, he built a telescope with a mirror diameter of nine inches and a length of 10 feet. Then he built one that was 20 feet long with a mirror diameter of 18 inches. In his mind there was no limit to the improvements he could make and the objects he would be able to see.

By Herschel had designed a foot-long telescope. But the mirrors needed for this telescope were more than the local foundry could handle. Herschel set up the equipment in the basement of his home and prepared to pour the disks himself. The first mirror he cast cracked, and the second attempt broke the mold, spreading the liquid metal over the floor.

But that didn't stop him. If two of the three FGSs were to fail, it would be necessary to observe in single-FGS mode all the time, a very risky prospect at the present time. The conclusion is that it is necessary to maintain a minimum of two out of three FGS units operational through the end of the Hubble mission. Currently, two of the three FGS units have deteriorated, and the time at which they will fail can be estimated.

The shuttle version of SM-4 includes such a unit, but the baseline robotic mission does not. Science instruments and related systems.

Information on deteriorating systems that potentially affect science instrument performance is summarized in Table 3. The failure of STIS illustrates why redundancy is so important to spacecraft health—at the time of its failure, STIS was one of only two non-redundant science instruments on the telescope, Side A having failed 2 years earlier.

TABLE 3. Side A electronics failed in ; Side B electronics failed in August ; feasibility of Side B repair under study. Reduction to two functioning gyros likely by early , one gyro by mid; new gyros to be installed during SM Nominal operations require three gyros. Two-gyro mode will degrade highest-resolution images slightly and reduce target visibility; no proven workaround for one-gyro mode. Some degradation in two of the three currently available FGSs; one is predicted to fail between and , leaving two without redundancy.

ACS, which is a workhorse camera with the largest field of view, would continue to operate. For this reason, early servicing is desirable to minimize the accumulating radiation damage. Both of these are included in the shuttle version of SM-4 but not in the baseline robotic mission.

These systems are discussed in Chapter 4 , which indicates that they are desirable but not essential for instrument functioning. To summarize, with the exception of STIS, all important items needed to keep Hubble functioning well through are included in the shuttle SM-4 servicing plan. Replacement of batteries and gyros and one FGS is deemed essential.

Any spacecraft is subject to unanticipated failures, but if the repairs envisioned for SM-4 are carried out promptly, there is every prospect that Hubble can operate effectively for another 4 to 5 years after servicing. This essential question is examined here, starting with programs that could be done with the existing instruments and proceeding to those depending on the two new instruments, WFC3 and COS.

It is important to note that typically only about half of all major discoveries made with new astronomical facilities are foreseen, while the other half are serendipitous. Hubble has been no exception in this regard—only five of the contributions listed in Table 3. Space here also permits listing only a small faction of the science projects likely to be undertaken. For both reasons, the following list provides a lower limit to the future discovery potential of Hubble.

One of the most active and exciting frontiers in astronomy in coming decades will be the discovery and study of planets in solar systems beyond our own.

More than extrasolar planetary systems have been discovered by ground-based telescopes , and they are very different from those in our own solar system. Planets similar in mass to Jupiter have been found, but they are very close to their parent stars and often in highly elliptical orbits—not at all like the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune that all orbit far from the Sun in nearly circular orbits.

Given an example of exactly one solar system—ours—theorists had invented tidy theories that predicted that its structure was inevitable. The new discoveries have overturned these ideas, and the field of solar-system formation is now in ferment.

A rapidly developing technique for finding planets detects them as they transit across the face of their parent star and block a small part of the light. This is evident in Figure 3. This scatter is only a factor of two larger than the dip caused by Earth as it passes in front of the Sun, as seen by a hypothetical distant observer. The first is illustrated in Figure 3. This is the only known way to measure planet radii.

The Kepler technique will produce many false positives that will have to be screened out by other methods. Kepler can do much of this itself, but the process will take years for Earth-size candidates; high-resolution Hubble photometry could provide much more rapid feedback and possible optimization of further Kepler observations.

For maximum benefit, Hubble operations should overlap the Kepler mission from to beyond Finally, Hubble can take exceptionally accurate spectra of planetary systems during eclipse, yielding measurements of water and other species in jovian-sized planetary atmospheres.

Photometry with the James Webb Space Telescope JWST will also have higher accuracy than that possible from ground-based telescopes and will also play an important role in planet detection. However, the scatter in the Hubble measurements is so small that even smaller planets could be detected.

Hubble has begun to monitor rich star fields like that shown in the background, which is a region near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. In this manner, several hundred thousand stars can be searched for Jupiter-size and smaller planets in roughly 1 week of Hubble Space Telescope observing time. Similarly, most of the stars targeted by the Kepler mission are too faint for effective imaging with ground-based adaptive optics systems.

Besides detection of extrasolar planets, a great variety of other important work will be able to continue if Hubble remains operational. A large number of new supernovas could be found for the study of dark energy, reducing uncertainties in its properties by a factor of two. A wealth of data would be taken to explore the nature of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and in neighboring galaxies. These satellites are relatively wide-field survey telescopes, one of whose expressed purposes is to detect objects for Hubble follow-up observations.

These programs are extremely important because there are no plans in the foreseeable future to replace Hubble with a telescope of comparable size and wavelength coverage. Forefront programs would be enabled by the two new instruments to be installed by SM-4—starting with the near-infrared arm of WFC3. Long-wavelength imaging has been a popular mode on Hubble, but the relatively small field of view of the NICMOS camera has been a serious handicap.

A major goal is observing the most distant galaxies, whose light is highly red-shifted by the expansion of the universe. WFC3 will reach these objects and enable Hubble at last to see the full distance to which its mirror is capable of giving access. The deepest image taken yet with Hubble is its Ultradeep Field, in which a handful of objects have been identified beyond a redshift of 6 see Figure 3. The age of the universe at this redshift is already 1 billion years; WFC3 images of the same field should reach back to redshift 10, nearly twice as close to the Big Bang.

This capability is critical because the universe evolved rapidly at these epochs, and even a small increase in look-back time can reveal new phenomena. This is the era of the first galaxies, when stars began shining and black holes began to evolve toward quasars, when the featureless cosmic void began to condense and lay the foundations for planets and life. WFC3 looks through a window that will shed light on our own distant past. How and when galaxies form stars is another great astronomical mystery.

Much of the early star formation seems to have occurred in bursts triggered by collisions of massive galaxies. Such bursts are hidden within dark clouds of gas and dust and cannot be seen at visible wavelengths. In this quest, WFC3 would work synergistically with the Spitzer infrared satellite, which will detect dust-enshrouded starbursts in great numbers but will rely on Hubble for high-resolution follow-up work. A third important task of WFC3 is to pursue and extend the supernova discovery program.

These objects have provided the best evidence that the universe is expanding faster with time, requiring dark energy to drive the acceleration. WFC3 could establish whether the amount of dark energy is evolving with time or has remained constant—potentially an extremely important question for fundamental physics. Even without WFC3, Hubble would make progress by likely discovering some 30 new supernovas in 4 years.

WFC3 would increase this detection rate by a factor of 2. Such distant supernovas are invisible now but should be detected in significant numbers by WFC3. The result would be much tighter constraints on the properties of dark matter. Other programs for the WFC3-IR camera include a hunt for water-bearing rocks on Mars and ices on outer satellites in the solar system. In each case, capabilities provided by Hubble will be unique among existing astronomical facilities.

This potential has been only partly realized to date, because of the difficulty of making space-qualified ultraviolet detectors. This pair of images illustrates why observing at many different wavelengths is required. Stellar populations redden as they age, as hot, blue, massive stars die away.

Slicing the spectrum into colors thus slices the stellar population into age cohorts, with the youngest, most recently formed stars visible in the ultraviolet. While detecting radiation is usually the goal, sometimes not detecting it is even more important.

Imaging at ultraviolet wavelengths can reveal the presence of distant proto-galaxies because light at wavelengths below 0. The other gap in instrumentation in the ultraviolet—spectroscopy—will be significantly filled by the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

COS is an instrument optimized for a number of highly important programs in cosmology. The cosmic web forms a huge network in space around our galaxy but is largely invisible because no stars or galaxies have yet formed in it. It contains many vital. It is at the intersection points of this so-called cosmic web that galaxies, and then clusters of galaxies, form. Because it contains only dark matter and gas that has not yet condensed into stars, the web is invisible.

However, gas inside it is capable of absorbing light that passes through it on the way to Earth from background objects. Evidence of this absorption can be seen in the spectrum of a background object, which has dips where light is removed by web-gas atoms. A sample spectrum is shown at the lower right. The much higher efficiency of the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph would enable it to take spectra of many more background quasars, creating a dense network of sight lines with which to probe the cosmic web.

The density and geometry of the web reflect the original density ripples in the universe that gave rise to all the structure seen today. If it were visible to the eye, the web would reveal the distribution of matter that has not yet fallen into galaxies—which is most of the matter in the universe!

The web is thus the dominant player in the cosmic-matter energy budget. With COS it would be possible to study the cosmic web in detail for the first time. Though not radiating much by itself, the web absorbs light from bright, background sources such as quasars, leaving.

As a consequence, many more faint quasars can be studied, making a much denser pattern of core-drillings through space.