Hubble's
final makeover is finished and the astronauts have said their goodbyes; now its
time for Hubble to test out its new gadgets and see just what they can do.
"Today
begins the second Hubble revolution," said Dave Leckrone, Hubble's senior
project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., which oversees the space telescope.
The shuttle
Atlantis released
Hubble yesterday from the ship's cargo bay, returning the 19-year-old
telescope to its rightful orbit 350 mile (563-km) above Earth.
Over the course
of five spacewalks in as many days, astronauts installed a brand new wide-field
camera for deep-space observations, a super-sensitive
spectrograph to detect faint light from distant developing galaxies, new
gyroscopes and batteries, insulation, and a fine guidance sensor for pointing
accuracy.
The
shuttle's crew also resurrected
Hubble's advanced camera and a versatile spectrograph that can double as an
imager.
"Now
we have increased Hubble's capability literally by orders of magnitude,"
Leckrone said.
So far, all
of Hubble's gizmos are looking good.
"Everything
has passed its aliveness test and its functional test," Leckrone said.
Scientists
are already lined up to use the new and improved telescope, though NASA
engineers have to go through a few more tests and calibrate each instrument
before Hubble will be ready to resume its science mission.
The
calibrations and checks are expected to run through the end of summer.
Mission
controllers plan to point Hubble's eye away from Earth to avoid CCD damage from
UV light for the first week or so and start calibrating with known targets soon
after.
These targets
will help make sure the camera is focused correctly and otherwise operating
normally. NASA will release the list of the calibration targets, which includes
a group of "very prosaic stars," Leckrone said.
"It's
extremely boring," he added.
But the
"boring" part won't last that long. Groups have already sent in
research proposals for Hubble's various instruments and will be able to start
their observations once the telescope checks out.
One
definite project will be a new deep-field image that will hopefully capture
galaxies even further back in the history of the universe than previous deep-field
surveys. Hubble aims to look at things as they were some 500 million years
after the birth of the universe.
Before the
mission, Leckrone said that they hoped to release the first images from the new
and improved Hubble sometime in September, though NASA isn't saying what the
first target will be because it could change.
This latest
phase of the Hubble mission is slated to last for at least five years, and
mission scientists are optimistic that its new findings will be every bit as
groundbreaking as the ones it has made over the past nearly two decades.
"It's show
time for us now," said Eric Smith, NASA's Hubble program scientist. "We got
everything we asked for, we're going to have a great mission for years to
come."
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