The Human EYE In Space, Hubble Telescope
The Hubble telescope, Built-in the 1990s 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 1940s. A paper was published in 1946 at Yale University on the advantages of astronomy from space and introduced the idea of a 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.
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 the Andromeda star was not just a star but another entire galaxy and he also discovered many other galaxies and also gave proof that the 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.
The images show the before and after correction of the Hubble telescope.
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 equipment. 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.
Since then the Hubble telescope has enriched our knowledge of Space and various phenomenons. Hubble showed us the remnants of a supernova and unexpectedly paved the way for 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, with 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 center of galaxies. It enabled astronomers to see a live collision of two astronomical objects. In 1996, the first image of a star other than the sun was released. The Scream Of Hell was also recorded by it. Regular servicing and installation of new instruments have been done regularly till the Colombia space shuttle disaster, which hindered one such mission.
The discoveries made by Hubble changed human perception of 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 that 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 of the findings of Hubble. Every Friday NASA releases a new image taken by Hubble. The Hubble telescope will be succeeded by the James Webb telescope in 2021, which is much more powerful than Hubble and predicted to discover the ‘dark matter’ and other phenomena happening in deep space.
Discovery has also been made that Our Earth spins faster than before, which resulted in the shortening of day to less than 24 hours!
