The Hubble telescope, launched in 1990, is in the news again with a new film and the prospect of being moth-balled by NASA.
The New York Times reviewed the new IMAX film about the Hubble telescope:
“Hubble 3D,” a 40-minute film about the Hubble repair, directed by Toni Myers and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, opened in Imax theaters and science centers around the country.
Besides bone-rattling liftoffs and astronauts goofing around in the space shuttle, the film features trips through the Hubble images themselves. In Imax and 3-D, the astronauts’ tethers brush your hair in some scenes and stars hit your face like raindrops in a summer storm in others. One scene shows a Hubble image I hadn’t seen before, of a protoplanetary disk of dust looking like a ring of hair, or a nest, surrounding a newly born star in the Orion nebula — Genesis there, maybe.
Newsweek magazine examines the likely end of the Hubble telescope’s useful life:
Next week President Obama is slated to deliver his first speech on the administration’s NASA policy, which calls for transferring routine space travel to private companies. The proposal has sparked fears of government layoffs and questions about the wisdom of ceding cosmic flight to Russia, China, and corporate America. But another likely consequence has been overlooked: the irrevocable end of the Hubble Space Telescope, hailed as the greatest eye on the cosmos since Galileo.
None of Hubble’s work—including the first images of planets orbiting another sun—would have been possible without the shuttle, which launched the device in 1990 and ferried astronauts up on five different occasions for crucial repairs. Last year’s maintenance trip left the orbiting camera more powerful than ever. But no more U.S. spacecraft, at least for the foreseeable future, means no more service trips—and a permanent sleep for the iconic machine the next time it breaks down, or when its batteries die around 2015.
Hubble was headed for retirement in any case: the technology is getting old, and with a limited budget, astronomers have elected to focus on a new camera that can pick up invisible ultraviolet light. But without federally run space travel, this device and any future Hubble II will need to work perfectly the first time (hardly a sure thing), be cheap enough to treat like a disposable camera (also a stretch), or be reachable using a commercial service.
Tags: Hubble
