What would you consider the greatest advance in astronomy since Galileo unarguably it would be Hubble. Hubble as one of the great scientific instruments of all time, which has given the clearest pictures of galaxies forming in the very early universe has always been in the news. The last time the Hubble Space Telescope was in the news, it had been symbolically tied to the railroad tracks and left for dead by the former NASA administrator, Sean O’Keefe.
Last week, Michael D. Griffin, current NASA administrator, sprung the Hubble from the rails, announcing that he would drive an astronaut crew in spring 2008 to breathe life into the telescope one more time. The declaration ensures that if all goes well, the Hubble will keep on sending back those postcards even after the space shuttles that launched and fostered it have been trucked to the bone yards and the museums.
The shuttles are planned to be retiring in 2010 to make way for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) that will take astronauts to the moon, Mars and beyond. But with restoring the telescope it will work until at least 2013 and will remain in orbit until 2021 or beyond.
It has recorded the deepest telescopic image made, showing galaxies, as they existed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang and in the course have raised to the level of celebrity. This for sure makes Hubble the first big space telescope and the first celebrity telescope of the Internet age. It is appropriate to say that the telescope will be the last robot standing in what has been a long and tense marriage between science and the space truck.
Via: thechronicleherald
