The Human EYE In Space, Hubble Telescope

Hubble Telescope

pic credit: NASA

The Hubble telescope, Built in 1990’s is still the most vibrant eye for humans towards the universe. The idea of building a large space telescope had been brought up back in the 1940’s. A paper was published in 1946 at Yale’s University on the advantages of astronomy from space and introduced the idea of large space telescope. It’s to be noted that his idea came up 11 years before the launch of the first ever satellite sputnik 1. However, the first meeting for setting up such a telescope was held in 1974 on behalf of NASA.

Edwin Hubble

pic credits:NASA

In the following year, funds were allotted and in 1978 the primary mirror grinding started. As the Telescope  be placed in space, astronauts had to be trained for fixing any issues and in 1979 NASA started its training procedures. The large telescope was named HUBBLE in honor of the astronomer Edwin Hubble,who proved that there were other galaxies in our universe and that they are moving away from our Milky Way galaxy at an increasing speed the farther away they are. He found that Andromeda star was not just a star but another entire galaxy and he also discovered many other galaxies and also gave proof that universe is expanding uniformly (which was later proved wrong using the Hubble space telescope and other ground observations) and ours was not the only galaxy but one in a million in the universe. The most interesting thing is that he made these discoveries in 1929 when the field of astronomy and space was taking firm roots all around the world.

Comparison of images taken from earth(left) and taken by Hubble in space(right)

pic credit: NASA

The Challenger disaster further halted the mission from progressing. Finally on 24 April 1990, Hubble along with 5 astronauts blasted off marking the start of a dream space exploration. It was deployed on April 25 with lots of effort put into opening the solar panels and other equipments. On MAY 20 1990, the first light image was taken by Hubble but soon scientists discovered it had a great flaw in Hubble. The images it took were scattered due to spherical aberration in the primary mirror. The aberration was just 2 microns about 1/50th of the width of a human hair. This might be negligible to us but from the image we can see even that kind of error completely ruined the whole mission.

 Image taken by Hubble before correction(left) and after correction(right)

pic credits: NASA

Replacing the mirror was not practical, so the best solution was to build replacement instruments that fixed the flaw much the same way a pair of glasses correct the vision of a near-sighted person. The corrective optics and new instruments were built and installed on Hubble by spacewalking astronauts during a shuttle mission in 1993. Five pairs of corrective lenses were placed.

 A deep space image taken by Hubble

All the spots seen are either galaxies or nebula

 pic credits: NASA

Since, then the Hubble telescope has enriched our knowledge on Space and various phenomenons. Hubble showed us the remnants of a supernova and unexpectedly paved the way to another great discovery. An accurate determination of the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and the supernova’s galactic home. The distance was measured at 169,000 light-years, within a five-percent accuracy. It also provided many images of different stars, galaxies which led way to many more discoveries. Hubble also helped to confirm the presence of supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies. It enabled astronomers to see live collision of two astronomical objects. In 1996, the first image of a star other than sun was released.The Scream Of Hell was also recorded by it. Regular servicing and installation of new instruments have been done on a regular basis till the Colombia space shuttle disaster which hindered one such mission.

Supernova remnants of 1987A recorded by Hubble

Planet growth recorded by Hubble

pic credits: NASA 

The discoveries made by Hubble changed human perception on space and phenomenons. Hundreds of papers have been submitted on a single image taken by it, so it’s impossible to mention everything in a small article. It discovered planets which could be habitable, comets breaking apart, stars forming, supernova, detection of elements and much more. You can check out the Instagram page NASA HUBBLE or website for a more in depth analysis on the findings of Hubble. Every Friday NASA releases a new image taken by Hubble. The Hubble telescope will be succeeded by James Webb telescope in 2021 which is much more powerful than Hubble and predicted to discover the ‘dark matter’ and other phenomenon happening in deep space.

A new discovery have also been made that Our Earth spins faster than before which resulted in the shortening of day to less than 24 hours!