The new and improved Hubble Space Telescope has spotted
a dragon-shaped cosmic mirage and other celestial wonders, showing
it is working better than ever following its latest repairs in
May.
Seven NASA astronauts visited Hubble in May on a space shuttle
mission to install a new camera and spectrograph, repair two older
instruments, and install new batteries as well as new gyroscopes
needed to keep the orbiting observatory properly oriented in
space.
On Wednesday, scientists released some spectacular new images
that demonstrate Hubble is performing well following the upgrades.
See a gallery of the new Hubble images
One of the pictures shows a galaxy stretched into a dragon shape
in a cosmic illusion. It is a normal spiral galaxy, but its light
rays get bent on their way to Earth due to the gravity of an
intervening galaxy cluster in a phenomenon called gravitational
lensing.
The galaxy's elongated appearance revealed it to be an example
of gravitational lensing more than two decades ago. But the new
Hubble image shows the galaxy in "incredible detail", exceeding
that of any previous image, says David Leckrone, senior project
scientist for Hubble at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Maryland.
"This is really fascinating to me – I've never seen anything
quite like this before," he said at a news conference on Wednesday
in Washington, DC.
The image was taken using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys,
which was repaired during the servicing mission in May following a
breakdown in 2007.
Also released today were new Hubble images showing a colourful
star cluster, a star-forming nebula, and a group of interacting
galaxies. "To see these first images is incredibly exciting for me
and the whole Hubble team," said astronaut Scott Altman, commander
of the May servicing mission.
The repairs done in May were designed to give Hubble at least 5
more years of life, but Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator
for science says he is betting it will last much longer. If all
goes according to NASA's plan, Hubble will be joined in 2014 by the
infrared James Webb Space Telescope. "Hopefully both of them will
operate for many years beyond 2014," Weiler says.
In addition to repairing the Advanced Camera for Surveys, the
servicing mission repaired an instrument for measuring light
spectra called the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and
installed two new instruments: the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph
(COS) and the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).
Future observations planned for Hubble include:
• Studying the atmospheres of alien planets that pass in front
of their parent stars as seen from Earth to reveal the planets'
chemical composition and other properties;
• An extremely long look at a region of the sky to detect faint
objects in the early universe. This could reveal infant galaxies
seen as they were less than 500 million years after the big bang –
improving on a previous 'ultra deep field' portrait that probed
back to about 700 million years after the big bang;
• A survey for objects in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy bodies
beyond Neptune, where Pluto resides
Scientists are "giddy" to have the capabilities of the new and
improved Hubble at their disposal, says Heidi Hammel of the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "Whether it's our local
neighbourhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets,
clusters of galaxies out to the edge of the universe – every field
has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble," she says.