Being a long-time astronomy enthusiast, I am very glad that the Hubble Space Telescope is busily producing magnificent images such as this one of Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 6217, seen on today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day:
From the HST website:
For the past three months, scientists and engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Goddard have been focusing, testing, and calibrating the instruments. Hubble is one of the most complex space telescopes ever launched, and the Hubble servicing mission astronauts performed major surgery on the 19-year-old observatory’s multiple systems. This orbital verification phase was interrupted briefly July 19 to observe Jupiter in the aftermath of a collision with a suspected comet.
Hubble now enters a phase of full science observations. The demand for observing time will be intense. Observations will range from studying the population of Kuiper Belt objects at the fringe of our solar system to surveying the birth of planets around other stars and probing the composition and structure of extrasolar planet atmospheres. There are ambitious plans to take the deepest-ever near-infrared portrait of the universe to reveal never-before-seen infant galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 500 million years old. Other planned observations will attempt to shed light on the behavior of dark energy, a repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.
Click on the image above to enlarge.
Yeah, too bad the shuttle is going out of service. Looks like the Hubble will only be good for another 5 years or so, given its past record.
Hopefully, the HST will exceed your 5 year prediction. After that, we hope to see the James Webb Space Telescope deployed to Lagrangian point 2. That should open our collective eyes beyond HST’s capacity by orders of magnitude.
Hopefully sometime soon the technology will become available when we can finally peer through the murky vastness of space, past the myriad clusters of galaxies, past the overweening light years full of dust, dark matter and as yet undefined material; past the known limits of space and time ’til we encounter the event horizon of the greatest, most colossal failure in eternity – the Bunghole of the Universe, aka Singularity of teh Stoopid™. It is here that we will finally uncover the origins of the DNC.
I never thought about that – the DNC just may be anal seepage from the Bunghole of the Universe (BOTU©).
Soooo, Lagrangian point 2 is that area that is always in the earth’s shadow from the Sun. Keep the telescope in the dark so to speak.
Kind of where the American taxpayer is w/r/t Obongo and the Congress….
Yep – sorta like that.
But Congress and the Administration have their collective heads up the BOTU®.