Now that the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope is
back up and running, with its first images unveiled last week, the astronomical
community — and the public at large — has a bevy of new images and observations
to look forward to.
In fact some observations have already produced
extraordinary results, not yet announced, from the earliest epoch of the
universe, according to a Hubble
project scientist.
Hubble was
revamped during a 13-day shuttle mission in May that gave the 19-year-old
telescope a new camera and super-sensitive spectrograph and repaired one of its
old cameras and spectrographs, as well as giving it new batteries and
gyroscopes, which help it point accurately at celestial objects.
These upgrades, performed by the Atlantis astronaut crew,
are expected to extend the space telescope's life through at least 2014, if not
longer.
Hubble has already started making new observations after its
three-month checkout phase, with the
first images showing distant clusters of galaxies, an eerie "pillar of
creation," a densely packed star cluster, and a "butterfly"
nebula.
Those observations were the first of many that Hubble will
make over the coming year as part of Hubble's Cycle 17. During about 3,400
orbits, Hubble will make observations for 228 programs pre-selected through a
peer-reviewed process and submitted by astronomers from all over the world,
said David Leckrone, senior project scientist for Hubble at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Back in time
The pièce de resistance of Hubble's
new mission, perhaps, is the planned new Deep Field image, to be taken with
the newly installed Wide Field Camera 3. Hubble has already made two such
mosaics, which have pushed back astronomers' view ever closer to the Big Bang,
which is the theoretical beginning of the universe. The new Deep Field will
continue that effort in the hopes of seeing some of the earliest galaxies or
proto-galaxies in the universe.
"The idea is just to push further back in time and
farther out across the universe and get as close to the Big Bang as we can,"
Leckrone said.
Hubble has already completed the first set of observations
needed to make this image. The rest will come in a year when the telescope is
again in the same orbital configuration. But the first observations will likely
already give scientists plenty to work with.
"I think they'll have something to say after this first
batch," Leckrone said. "The rumblings I'm getting are that they
already have extraordinary results."
Leckrone says that the results from the new camera and
spectrograph already sound stunning and that the instrument is more sensitive
than mission scientists had expected.
"My mouth is watering, I can't wait to hear what they
find," he told SPACE.com.
Mysterious matter
Hubble's instruments will also be put to use trying to
unravel the mystery
of dark energy.
A big question in both astronomy and physics is the nature
of dark matter and dark energy, Leckrone said: "What's causing the
universe's expansion to speed up, to accelerate?
One of the ways in which Hubble will investigate this mystery
is by refining astronomers' understanding of Type 1A supernovas, the so-called
standard candles that tell how far apart galaxies are from each other — a key
to understanding how fast they are speeding away from each other.
Another way the space telescope will help tackle this
question is by helping to further refine the Hubble constant, the measure of
how fast the universe is expanding today.
"If you can get the error bars on that way, way down to
just a few percent, then that in itself will tell you something about dark
energy," Leckrone said.
The brand-new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph will also lend a
hand in this effort by probing filaments of dark matter and the ordinary matter
that clings to it and building a 3-D map of matter in the universe, said James
Green, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph principal investigator at the University of Colorado.
Family history
Because these filaments will likely be probed out to a
distance of 7 to 8 billion light-years, it will also help astronomers better understand
the conditions of the early universe.
"So we're going to understand an awful lot more about
how galaxies formed and evolved over time," Leckrone said. This topic is
another theme of Hubble's new research efforts; more specifically,
understanding how galaxies are born and grow will help us understand the
development of our own Milky Way, as well as our own star and solar system.
"What we're doing is piecing together the whole family
history of galaxies," Leckrone said.
A plan to map the orbits of Milky Way satellite galaxies
will also shed light on our family history (as well as a more accurate measure
of the Milky Way's mass and the amount of dark matter in and around it).
Probing planets
Hubble will also continue its work observing extrasolar
planets — a capability of the telescope only recently discovered.
One of the main reasons mission managers wanted to bring the
Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) back online was so that it could go
back to work on these exoplanets," Leckrone said.
STIS and Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object
Spectrometer (NICMOS) have both detected exoplanets and NICMOS event detected
organic molecules on one, "and that was very exciting," Leckrone
said.
Right before the servicing mission, Hubble detected a planet
around the hot star Fomalhaut. The team that found the planet hope to observe
it again when NICMOS comes back online (as it is expected to in a few months).
But those aren't the only instruments that will be probing
planets outside our solar system.
"The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph is keen on getting
their oar into this water with their very special capabilities," Leckrone
said.
Planned research programs will also look at how planets
form, by examining the material around stars to learn more about the
environment in which planets might arise.
Closer to home
Hubble will also be investigating mysteries closer to home,
particularly the objects
of the Kuiper belt, including Pluto. Relatively little is known about the
outer reaches of our solar system and its denizens.
"We don't know what's out there in our own solar system
at the farthest reaches of our own solar system," Leckrone said. But with
Hubble, "we have the really good tools to go look at these very cold
objects and learn a lot more about how many of them there are and what
properties they have and what are things like out in the outer suburbs of our
own solar system."
Hubble's refurbishment also hits home in a different way:
After 33 years of working on Hubble (and 40 years at NASA), Leckrone is
retiring on Oct. 2. But Leckrone is happy to go out on a high note.
"I feel like the baseball player who is leaving while
his batting average is still high. I could hang around longer, but this is the
highest of high notes, this is the highest pinnacle that I will have reached in
my career, after 33 years on Hubble," Leckrone said. "So I think this
is a great time to go out, and it's a great time to go try do some other
things, including maybe getting into some research with Hubble."
Asked what of Hubble's new projects he was most excited
about, Leckrone said, "The deep field is what I'm really keen on."
And Leckrone is happy with the final version of Hubble that
NASA has given the world.
"I think we've done our job, providing the very best
modern, cutting-edge tools, and a whole bunch of different tools, of different
kinds, that will give the scientific community around the world the best possible
opportunity to succeed," he said. "Now it's up to [astronomers] to go
do it. Let's go, let's get it done."
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