It does raise a question about our place in God’s creation. Hubble takes us a long way from the 3x telescope that formed the basis of Galileo’s observations of the solar system and shows us even more fully the grandeur and beauty of God’s creation. By looking for long periods of time (10 days or more, something difficult to do on earth), it showed that many galaxies were formed 500 million years after the Big Bang, changing our ideas about the genesis of the cosmos. It recorded that there were massive black holes at the centre of most galaxies. Hubble’s observations led to the discovery of dark energy as being responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. The age of the universe has been more precisely determined as 13.8 billion years (guesses once ranged from 10 to 20 billion years). A tremendous amount of science, over 12,800 scientific articles, has flowed from Hubble’s images. I’m sure many of us have seen some of Hubble’s images of God’s creation, such as the image titled the “Pillars of Creation,” but Hubble does more than reveal creation’s astronomical glory. In 1993 a space mission, the first of five repair missions, installed a set of mirrors that corrected the problem, and Hubble started to perform as designed. When the telescope was first turned on, its images were distorted the telescope’s mirror had a flaw (1/50th the thickness of a sheet of paper). Its 2.4-metre primary mirror is small by earth-telescope standards but gives astonishing pictures across a wide range of light wavelengths (many of which we are protected from by the same atmosphere). This space telescope has a wonderful view of the heavens because it is not limited by the distortions and absorption of light by the earth’s atmosphere. On April 24, 1990, the space shuttle Discovery lifted the Hubble Space telescope into the heavens. For the last 25 years this science has been supported by beautiful images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The science of astronomy has expanded and exploded since Galileo supported Copernicus’ view that the earth revolved around the sun, which also created controversy within the church about the age and scale of the creation. A year later he argued that the earth was not the centre of the universe, which created a huge problem for the church at that time. In 1609 Galileo made his first telescope. The Hubble was saved and was actually producing images better than we had publicly predicted.The heavens are telling the glory of God. A backup imaging camera was installed that had the correction figured into the internal mirrors that were already part of its design. This box was altered to house a set of mirrors that would correct the convergent light beam coming from the flawed primary mirror so it would reach the scientific instruments in pristine condition. An empty instrument box had been made before the 1990 launch to be used in case one of the scientific instruments was not ready in time. The scientific instruments were housed in easily changed-out boxes. That success reflected the finest hours (years actually) of NASA and Aerospace engineers and managers, the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Astronaut Corps. STScIĪnd improve they did with the servicing mission of December 1993. Over the next several years the articles on the Hubble changed from the initial subjects of “how can such a major screw-up occur,” to lead-ins of “the crippled Hubble has shown this interesting scientific result,” until finally the science stories would simply end with a mention in the last paragraph that the Hubble was working with a flawed mirror, but it was expected that things would be improved after the first servicing mission.Īstronauts remove the Wide Field and Planetary Camera to replace it with its more powerful successor, Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, during Hubble’s first servicing mission in 1993. However, researchers developed computer programs to accurately remove the halo and the scientific value of the resulting images began to be appreciated. We were pilloried, investigated, and a subject of mean-spirited cartoons. Instead of a single sharp core where 90% of the light focused, there was a sharp core with 20% of the light surrounded by a halo. That error resulted in a mirror that formed a degraded image. The telescope’s primary mirror had been created with great precision and measured with unprecedented accuracy but the measuring equipment was misaligned. Within a few weeks it looked like those early skeptics were the wise ones amongst us. Persson (Las Campanas Observatory, Chile)/Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington Bumpy ride at first Compare with a ground-based picture from Las Campanas, Chile, Observatory of the same region of the sky. On the right is part of the first image taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field/Planetary Camera.
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