When is Hubble to be retired? How many mission extensions has it had?

It shouldn't last beyond 2025 and will probably be killed by its last control gyroscopes breaking down.

So far the damn thing has been extremely resilient, to say the least. In orbit since 1990, last maintenance mission in May 2009 before the Shuttle went away. That's 12 years.

-----

I would love to see a Starship catching it ("You only leave twice" style) and returning it to Earth solid ground and the NASM; but that's way too complicated (solar arrays and a ton of other things standing in the way).
 
It'll be retired when something breaks that cannot be fixed.
The last mission extension I could find was in 2016 for 5 years.
 
When is Hubble to be retired? How many mission extensions has it had?

It shouldn't last beyond 2025 and will probably be killed by its last control gyroscopes breaking down.

So far the damn thing has been extremely resilient, to say the least. In orbit since 1990, last maintenance mission in May 2009 before the Shuttle went away. That's 12 years.

-----

I would love to see a Starship catching it ("You only leave twice" style) and returning it to Earth solid ground and the NASM; but that's way too complicated (solar arrays and a ton of other things standing in the way).

I can agree with that point about Hubble not lasting beyond 2025 Archibald, though I would think that NASA will send a command to Hubble to burn up in the atmosphere, after all did they not attach a rocket motor on Hubble the last time astronauts went up to upgrade Hubble?
 
When is Hubble to be retired? How many mission extensions has it had?

It shouldn't last beyond 2025 and will probably be killed by its last control gyroscopes breaking down.

So far the damn thing has been extremely resilient, to say the least. In orbit since 1990, last maintenance mission in May 2009 before the Shuttle went away. That's 12 years.

-----

I would love to see a Starship catching it ("You only leave twice" style) and returning it to Earth solid ground and the NASM; but that's way too complicated (solar arrays and a ton of other things standing in the way).

I can agree with that point about Hubble not lasting beyond 2025 Archibald, though I would think that NASA will send a command to Hubble to burn up in the atmosphere, after all did they not attach a rocket motor on Hubble the last time astronauts went up to upgrade Hubble?

It's a control issue afaik. If they lose the last gyroscope it will tumble and end like Envisat. Unable to commit suicide by desorbiting.
 
When is Hubble to be retired? How many mission extensions has it had?

It shouldn't last beyond 2025 and will probably be killed by its last control gyroscopes breaking down.

So far the damn thing has been extremely resilient, to say the least. In orbit since 1990, last maintenance mission in May 2009 before the Shuttle went away. That's 12 years.

-----

I would love to see a Starship catching it ("You only leave twice" style) and returning it to Earth solid ground and the NASM; but that's way too complicated (solar arrays and a ton of other things standing in the way).

I can agree with that point about Hubble not lasting beyond 2025 Archibald, though I would think that NASA will send a command to Hubble to burn up in the atmosphere, after all did they not attach a rocket motor on Hubble the last time astronauts went up to upgrade Hubble?

It's a control issue afaik. If they lose the last gyroscope it will tumble and end like Envisat. Unable to commit suicide by desorbiting.

What ever happens to Hubble, when the end does come it will be a sad day for Astronomy/Cosmology and Science in general.
 
Hubble’s science instruments went into safe mode on Monday after experiencing synchronization issues with internal spacecraft communications. Science observations have been temporarily suspended while the team investigates the issue. The instruments remain in good health.
View: https://mobile.twitter.com/NASAHubble/status/1452755542796025868

While it is good that Hubbles other instruments remain in good health it is not so goon that Hubble went into safe mode because of synchronisation issues with internal communications, let's hope that the issue can be sorted and that science can once again resume.
 
We’ve asked a lot of that platform. It must score as one of the longest serving satellites in history.
 
We’ve asked a lot of that platform. It must score as one of the longest serving satellites in history.

That's so true Josh_TN. Hubble is the satellite that could never die despite all the things that have got wrong in the past.
 
Hubble Remains in Safe Mode, NASA Team Investigating


I wonder what put Hubble into safe mode if all the instruments are healthy? Could it just be Hubble showing it’s age?
 
Hubble Remains in Safe Mode, NASA Team Investigating


I wonder what put Hubble into safe mode if all the instruments are healthy? Could it just be Hubble showing it’s age?
It doesn’t seem that would be a too unlikely explanation in my book.
 
Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have managed to restore the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to normal operations, but the observatory’s other instruments remain in safe mode while engineers troubleshoot a complex data synchronisation glitch.
In the meantime, NASA has awarded a $215 million contract extension to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) to continue Hubble science operations through 30 June 2026. Total value of the operations contract over Hubble’s three decades in space is about $2.4 billion.

 
Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have managed to restore the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to normal operations, but the observatory’s other instruments remain in safe mode while engineers troubleshoot a complex data synchronisation glitch.
In the meantime, NASA has awarded a $215 million contract extension to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) to continue Hubble science operations through 30 June 2026. Total value of the operations contract over Hubble’s three decades in space is about $2.4 billion.

Good news that NASA awarded AURA $215 million dollars to continue to operate Hubble through to 30 June 2026, there was always talk that Hubble would be de-orbited sometime after the James Webb reached the fifth Lagrange point and to start observations. I still find it strange that Godard cannot get the other Hubble instruments working but have succeeded in getting ACS to work.
 

Nov 22, 2021
NASA Closer to Full Hubble Operations as Another Instrument Resumes Science

NASA continues bringing the Hubble Space Telescope back to normal science operations, most recently recovering the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument Sunday, Nov. 21. This camera will be the second of Hubble’s instruments, after the Advanced Camera for Surveys, to resume science after suspending the spacecraft’s observations Oct. 25. The Wide Field Camera 3's first science observation since the anomaly will be Nov. 23.

The team chose to restore the most heavily used Hubble instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3, which represents more than a third of the spacecraft’s observing time. Engineers also began preparing changes to the instrument parameters, while testing the changes on ground simulators. These changes would allow the instruments to handle several missed synchronization messages while continuing to operate normally if they occur in the future. These changes will first be applied to another instrument, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, to further protect its sensitive far-ultraviolet detector. It will take the team several weeks to complete the testing and upload the changes to the spacecraft.

Although the team has identified no further message losses since monitoring began Nov. 1, NASA is taking extra steps to keep the hardware safe in case the issue reoccurs. Investigation continues into the cause of the missed messages. The remaining Hubble instruments are still in safe mode and the rest of the spacecraft continues to operate as expected.
 

Nov 22, 2021
NASA Closer to Full Hubble Operations as Another Instrument Resumes Science

NASA continues bringing the Hubble Space Telescope back to normal science operations, most recently recovering the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument Sunday, Nov. 21. This camera will be the second of Hubble’s instruments, after the Advanced Camera for Surveys, to resume science after suspending the spacecraft’s observations Oct. 25. The Wide Field Camera 3's first science observation since the anomaly will be Nov. 23.

The team chose to restore the most heavily used Hubble instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3, which represents more than a third of the spacecraft’s observing time. Engineers also began preparing changes to the instrument parameters, while testing the changes on ground simulators. These changes would allow the instruments to handle several missed synchronization messages while continuing to operate normally if they occur in the future. These changes will first be applied to another instrument, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, to further protect its sensitive far-ultraviolet detector. It will take the team several weeks to complete the testing and upload the changes to the spacecraft.

Although the team has identified no further message losses since monitoring began Nov. 1, NASA is taking extra steps to keep the hardware safe in case the issue reoccurs. Investigation continues into the cause of the missed messages. The remaining Hubble instruments are still in safe mode and the rest of the spacecraft continues to operate as expected.

I don’t suppose we will ever know what made Hubble go into safe mode the way it did, but it is good news that NASA are close to returning to full science operations with Hubble.
 

The Hubble Space Telescope team recovered the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph instrument on Sunday, Nov. 28, moving the telescope further toward full science operations. Three of Hubble’s four active instruments are now collecting science data once again.

The team also continued work on developing and testing changes to instrument software that would allow them to conduct science operations even if they encounter several lost synchronization messages in the future. Those changes would first be installed on the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph once they’re completed and tested within a few weeks. Hubble’s other instruments would also receive similar changes. The team has not detected further synchronization message issues since monitoring began Nov. 1.
 

The Hubble Space Telescope team recovered the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph instrument on Sunday, Nov. 28, moving the telescope further toward full science operations. Three of Hubble’s four active instruments are now collecting science data once again.

The team also continued work on developing and testing changes to instrument software that would allow them to conduct science operations even if they encounter several lost synchronization messages in the future. Those changes would first be installed on the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph once they’re completed and tested within a few weeks. Hubble’s other instruments would also receive similar changes. The team has not detected further synchronization message issues since monitoring began Nov. 1.

Good news for Hubble that another instrument has finally come back on line. And it is the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph as well.
 
Dec 7, 2021
NASA Returns Hubble to Full Science Operations

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope team recovered the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on Monday, Dec. 6, and is now operating with all four active instruments collecting science. The team has still not detected any further synchronization message issues since monitoring began Nov. 1.

The team will continue work on developing and testing changes to instrument software that would allow them to conduct science operations even if they encounter several lost synchronization messages in the future. The first of these changes is scheduled to be installed on the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph in mid-December. The other instruments will receive similar updates in the coming months.

Hubble has been operating now for over 31 years, collecting ground-breaking science observations that have changed our fundamental understanding of the universe. With the launch of the Webb Telescope planned for later this month, NASA expects the two observatories will work together well into this decade, expanding our knowledge of the cosmos even further.

 
Record Broken: Hubble Spots Farthest Star Ever Seen

The previous record holder's light took 9 billion years to reach Earth. It's an enormous blue star nicknamed “Icarus."

Earendel should not be confused with the oldest known star, nicknamed “Methuselah,” discovered by Hubble in 2013.

Hubble also holds the cosmic distance record for a galaxy. Its light took 13.4 billion years to reach Earth.
Lee esta nota de prensa en español aquí.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang – the farthest individual star ever seen to date.

The find is a huge leap further back in time from the previous single-star record holder; detected by Hubble in 2018. That star existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30 percent of its current age, at a time that astronomers refer to as “redshift 1.5.” Scientists use the word “redshift” because as the universe expands, light from distant objects is stretched or “shifted” to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels toward us.

The newly detected star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at redshift 6.2. The smallest objects previously seen at such a great distance are clusters of stars, embedded inside early galaxies.

“We almost didn’t believe it at first, it was so much farther than the previous most-distant, highest redshift star,” said astronomer Brian Welch of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the paper describing the discovery, which is published in the March 30 journal Nature. The discovery was made from data collected during Hubble’s RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey) program, led by co-author Dan Coe at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), also in Baltimore.

“Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together,” said Welch. “The galaxy hosting this star has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that we named the Sunrise Arc.”

After studying the galaxy in detail, Welch determined that one feature is an extremely magnified star that he called Earendel, which means “morning star” in Old English. The discovery holds promise for opening up an uncharted era of very early star formation.

“Earendel existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today,” Welch explained. “Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything we do know. It’s like we’ve been reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we will have a chance to see how it all got started,” Welch said.

When Stars Align
The research team estimates that Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times as bright, rivaling the most massive stars known. But even such a brilliant, very high-mass star would be impossible to see at such a great distance without the aid of natural magnification by a huge galaxy cluster, WHL0137-08, sitting between us and Earendel. The mass of the galaxy cluster warps the fabric of space, creating a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the light from distant objects behind it.

Thanks to the rare alignment with the magnifying galaxy cluster, the star Earendel appears directly on, or extremely close to, a ripple in the fabric of space. This ripple, which is defined in optics as a “caustic,” provides maximum magnification and brightening. The effect is analogous to the rippled surface of a swimming pool creating patterns of bright light on the bottom of the pool on a sunny day. The ripples on the surface act as lenses and focus sunlight to maximum brightness on the pool floor.

This caustic causes the star Earendel to pop out from the general glow of its home galaxy. Its brightness is magnified a thousandfold or more. At this point, astronomers are not able to determine if Earendel is a binary star, though most massive stars have at least one smaller companion star.

Confirmation with Webb
Astronomers expect that Earendel will remain highly magnified for years to come. It will be observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s high sensitivity to infrared light is needed to learn more about Earendel, because its light is stretched (redshifted) to longer infrared wavelengths due to the universe’s expansion.

“With Webb we expect to confirm Earendel is indeed a star, as well as measure its brightness and temperature,” Coe said. These details will narrow down its type and stage in the stellar lifecycle. "We also expect to find the Sunrise Arc galaxy is lacking in heavy elements that form in subsequent generations of stars. This would suggest Earendel is a rare, massive metal-poor star,” Coe said.

Earendel’s composition will be of great interest for astronomers, because it formed before the universe was filled with the heavy elements produced by successive generations of massive stars. If follow-up studies find that Earendel is only made up of primordial hydrogen and helium, it would be the first evidence for the legendary Population III stars, which are hypothesized to be the very first stars born after the big bang. While the probability is small, Welch admits it is enticing all the same.

“With Webb, we may see stars even farther than Earendel, which would be incredibly exciting,” Welch said. “We’ll go as far back as we can. I would love to see Webb break Earendel’s distance record.”

View: https://youtu.be/0YMRuh772IA


The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.

 
Record Broken: Hubble Spots Farthest Star Ever Seen

The previous record holder's light took 9 billion years to reach Earth. It's an enormous blue star nicknamed “Icarus."

Earendel should not be confused with the oldest known star, nicknamed “Methuselah,” discovered by Hubble in 2013.

Hubble also holds the cosmic distance record for a galaxy. Its light took 13.4 billion years to reach Earth.
Lee esta nota de prensa en español aquí.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang – the farthest individual star ever seen to date.

The find is a huge leap further back in time from the previous single-star record holder; detected by Hubble in 2018. That star existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30 percent of its current age, at a time that astronomers refer to as “redshift 1.5.” Scientists use the word “redshift” because as the universe expands, light from distant objects is stretched or “shifted” to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels toward us.

The newly detected star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at redshift 6.2. The smallest objects previously seen at such a great distance are clusters of stars, embedded inside early galaxies.

“We almost didn’t believe it at first, it was so much farther than the previous most-distant, highest redshift star,” said astronomer Brian Welch of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead author of the paper describing the discovery, which is published in the March 30 journal Nature. The discovery was made from data collected during Hubble’s RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey) program, led by co-author Dan Coe at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), also in Baltimore.

“Normally at these distances, entire galaxies look like small smudges, with the light from millions of stars blending together,” said Welch. “The galaxy hosting this star has been magnified and distorted by gravitational lensing into a long crescent that we named the Sunrise Arc.”

After studying the galaxy in detail, Welch determined that one feature is an extremely magnified star that he called Earendel, which means “morning star” in Old English. The discovery holds promise for opening up an uncharted era of very early star formation.

“Earendel existed so long ago that it may not have had all the same raw materials as the stars around us today,” Welch explained. “Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe that we are unfamiliar with, but that led to everything we do know. It’s like we’ve been reading a really interesting book, but we started with the second chapter, and now we will have a chance to see how it all got started,” Welch said.

When Stars Align
The research team estimates that Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times as bright, rivaling the most massive stars known. But even such a brilliant, very high-mass star would be impossible to see at such a great distance without the aid of natural magnification by a huge galaxy cluster, WHL0137-08, sitting between us and Earendel. The mass of the galaxy cluster warps the fabric of space, creating a powerful natural magnifying glass that distorts and greatly amplifies the light from distant objects behind it.

Thanks to the rare alignment with the magnifying galaxy cluster, the star Earendel appears directly on, or extremely close to, a ripple in the fabric of space. This ripple, which is defined in optics as a “caustic,” provides maximum magnification and brightening. The effect is analogous to the rippled surface of a swimming pool creating patterns of bright light on the bottom of the pool on a sunny day. The ripples on the surface act as lenses and focus sunlight to maximum brightness on the pool floor.

This caustic causes the star Earendel to pop out from the general glow of its home galaxy. Its brightness is magnified a thousandfold or more. At this point, astronomers are not able to determine if Earendel is a binary star, though most massive stars have at least one smaller companion star.

Confirmation with Webb
Astronomers expect that Earendel will remain highly magnified for years to come. It will be observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s high sensitivity to infrared light is needed to learn more about Earendel, because its light is stretched (redshifted) to longer infrared wavelengths due to the universe’s expansion.

“With Webb we expect to confirm Earendel is indeed a star, as well as measure its brightness and temperature,” Coe said. These details will narrow down its type and stage in the stellar lifecycle. "We also expect to find the Sunrise Arc galaxy is lacking in heavy elements that form in subsequent generations of stars. This would suggest Earendel is a rare, massive metal-poor star,” Coe said.

Earendel’s composition will be of great interest for astronomers, because it formed before the universe was filled with the heavy elements produced by successive generations of massive stars. If follow-up studies find that Earendel is only made up of primordial hydrogen and helium, it would be the first evidence for the legendary Population III stars, which are hypothesized to be the very first stars born after the big bang. While the probability is small, Welch admits it is enticing all the same.

“With Webb, we may see stars even farther than Earendel, which would be incredibly exciting,” Welch said. “We’ll go as far back as we can. I would love to see Webb break Earendel’s distance record.”

View: https://youtu.be/0YMRuh772IA


The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.


Is this Hubble laying down the gauntlet to the to the Webb Space Telescope before they retire it? It will be interesting to see how the JWST responds.
 
EVIDENCE SHOWS VIOLENT COLLAPSE RESPONSIBLE FOR FORMATION OF JUPITER-LIKE PROTOPLANET

In general, the formation of planets in our universe can be likened to cooking a meal. Just like the "ingredients" for forming a planet can change, so can the "cooking method."

Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope have caught a planet in the act of what could be likened to a "flash fry" — a violent and intense process called disk instability. In this method, instead of having a planet that grows and builds up from a small core accumulating matter and gas, the protoplanetary disk around a star cools, and gravity causes it to break up into one or more planet-mass fragments.

Astronomers have long searched for clear evidence of this process as a viable candidate in forming large, Jupiter-like planets, and Hubble's resolution and longevity proved to be a key missing puzzle piece.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has directly photographed evidence of a Jupiter-like protoplanet forming through what researchers describe as an "intense and violent process." This discovery supports a long-debated theory for how planets like Jupiter form, called "disk instability."

The new world under construction is embedded in a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas with distinct spiral structure swirling around, surrounding a young star that's estimated to be around 2 million years old. That's about the age of our solar system when planet formation was underway. (The solar system's age is currently 4.6 billion years.)

"Nature is clever; it can produce planets in a range of different ways," said Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope and Eureka Scientific, lead researcher on the study.

All planets are made from material that originated in a circumstellar disk. The dominant theory for jovian planet formation is called "core accretion," a bottom-up approach where planets embedded in the disk grow from small objects — with sizes ranging from dust grains to boulders — colliding and sticking together as they orbit a star. This core then slowly accumulates gas from the disk. In contrast, the disk instability approach is a top-down model where as a massive disk around a star cools, gravity causes the disk to rapidly break up into one or more planet-mass fragments.

The newly forming planet, called AB Aurigae b, is probably about nine times more massive than Jupiter and orbits its host star at a whopping distance of 8.6 billion miles – over two times farther than Pluto is from our Sun. At that distance it would take a very long time, if ever, for a Jupiter-sized planet to form by core accretion. This leads researchers to conclude that the disk instability has enabled this planet to form at such a great distance. And, it is in a striking contrast to expectations of planet formation by the widely accepted core accretion model.

The new analysis combines data from two Hubble instruments: the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrograph. These data were compared to those from a state-of-the-art planet imaging instrument called SCExAO on Japan's 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope located at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The wealth of data from space and ground-based telescopes proved critical, because distinguishing between infant planets and complex disk features unrelated to planets is very difficult.

"Interpreting this system is extremely challenging," Currie said. "This is one of the reasons why we needed Hubble for this project—a clean image to better separate the light from the disk and any planet."

Nature itself also provided a helping hand: the vast disk of dust and gas swirling around the star AB Aurigae is tilted nearly face-on to our view from Earth.

Currie emphasized that Hubble's longevity played a particular role in helping researchers measure the protoplanet's orbit. He was originally very skeptical that AB Aurigae b was a planet. The archival data from Hubble, combined with imaging from Subaru, proved to be a turning point in changing his mind.

"We could not detect this motion on the order of a year or two years," Currie said. "Hubble provided a time baseline, combined with Subaru data, of 13 years, which was sufficient to be able to detect orbital motion."

"This result leverages ground and space observations and we get to go back in time with Hubble archival observations," Olivier Guyon of the University of Arizona, Tucson, and Subaru Telescope, Hawaii added. "AB Aurigae b has now been looked at in multiple wavelengths, and a consistent picture has emerged—one that's very solid."

The team's results are published in the April 4 issue of Nature Astronomy.

"This new discovery is strong evidence that some gas giant planets can form by the disk instability mechanism," Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington, D.C. emphasized. "In the end, gravity is all that counts, as the leftovers of the star-formation process will end up being pulled together by gravity to form planets, one way or the other."

Understanding the early days of the formation of Jupiter-like planets provides astronomers with more context into the history of our own solar system. This discovery paves the way for future studies of the chemical make-up of protoplanetary disks like AB Aurigae, including with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.

 
Hubble Confirms Largest Comet Nucleus Ever Seen

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has determined the size of the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers.

This image sequence shows how the nucleus of Comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) was isolated from a vast shell of dust and gas surrounding the solid icy nucleus. On the left is a photo of the comet taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 on 8 January 2022. A model of the coma (middle panel) was obtained by means of fitting the surface brightness profile assembled from the observed image on the left. This allowed for the coma to be subtracted, unveiling the point-like glow from the nucleus. Combined with radio telescope data, astronomers arrived at a precise measurement of the nucleus size. That's no small feat from something roughly 4.8 billion kilometres away. Though the nucleus is estimated to be as large as 135 kilometres across, it is so far away it cannot be resolved by Hubble. Its size is derived from its reflectivity as measured by Hubble. The nucleus is estimated to be as black as charcoal. The nucleus area is gleaned from radio observations.


View: https://youtu.be/fAEjtd7pqAE
 
Hubble Confirms Largest Comet Nucleus Ever Seen

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has determined the size of the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers.

This image sequence shows how the nucleus of Comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) was isolated from a vast shell of dust and gas surrounding the solid icy nucleus. On the left is a photo of the comet taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 on 8 January 2022. A model of the coma (middle panel) was obtained by means of fitting the surface brightness profile assembled from the observed image on the left. This allowed for the coma to be subtracted, unveiling the point-like glow from the nucleus. Combined with radio telescope data, astronomers arrived at a precise measurement of the nucleus size. That's no small feat from something roughly 4.8 billion kilometres away. Though the nucleus is estimated to be as large as 135 kilometres across, it is so far away it cannot be resolved by Hubble. Its size is derived from its reflectivity as measured by Hubble. The nucleus is estimated to be as black as charcoal. The nucleus area is gleaned from radio observations.


View: https://youtu.be/fAEjtd7pqAE

It is a shame that it won’t come any closer to Earth to be a possible daylight comet, we have not had a comet that has been visible during the day since the great comet of 1910.
 
Celebrating Hubble’s 32nd Birthday with a Galaxy Grouping

19 April 2022

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 32nd birthday with a stunning look at an unusual close-knit collection of five galaxies, called the Hickson Compact Group 40. This snapshot reflects a special moment in their lifetimes as they fall together before they merge.

 
Celebrating Hubble’s 32nd Birthday with a Galaxy Grouping

19 April 2022

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 32nd birthday with a stunning look at an unusual close-knit collection of five galaxies, called the Hickson Compact Group 40. This snapshot reflects a special moment in their lifetimes as they fall together before they merge.


Yet another milestone for the Hubble Space Telescope. And a spectacular photo as well.
 
Hubble observations used to answer key exoplanet questions

25 April 2022

Archival observations of 25 hot Jupiters by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have been analysed by an international team of astronomers, enabling them to answer five open questions important to our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres. Amongst other findings, the team found that the presence of metal oxides and hydrides in the hottest exoplanet atmospheres was clearly correlated with the atmospheres' being thermally inverted.

 

heic2207 — Photo Release
Global Citizen Science Project Finds Over 1700 Asteroid Trails in Hubble Images

6 May 2022

Combining artificial intelligence with many keen human eyes, astronomers have found 1701 new asteroid trails in archival data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, consisting of more than 37 000 images that span two decades. The project reflects both Hubble’s value to scientists as an asteroid hunter and how the public can effectively contribute to citizen science initiatives.

On International Asteroid Day in June 2019 an international group of astronomers launched the Hubble Asteroid Hunter, a citizen science project to identify asteroids in archival Hubble data. The initiative was developed by researchers and engineers at the European Science and Technology Centre (ESTEC) and the European Space Astronomy Centre’s Science Data Centre (ESDC), in collaboration with the Zooniverse platform, the world’s largest and most popular citizen science platform, and Google.

The astronomers collectively identified more than 37 000 composite images taken between April 2002 and March 2021 with Hubble’s ACS and WFC3 instruments. With a typical observation time of 30 minutes, asteroid trails appear as curved lines or streaks in these images. Over 11 400 members of the public classified and analysed these images. More than 1000 trails were identified, providing a training set for an automated algorithm based on artificial intelligence. The combination of citizen science and AI resulted in a final dataset containing 1701 trails in 1316 Hubble images. Project participants also tagged various other astronomical objects, such as gravitational lenses, galaxies and nebulae. Volunteers discussed their findings and sought assistance from scientists and other participants via the project’s forum.

Roughly one third of the asteroid trails seen could be identified and attributed to known asteroids in the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Centre, the largest database of Solar System objects. This left 1031 unidentified trails that are faint and likely to be smaller asteroids than those detected in ground-based surveys. The vast majority of these asteroids are expected to be located in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter, where asteroids of such small size are as yet poorly studied. These trails could give the astronomers insightful clues about the conditions in the early Solar System when the planets were forming.

The project highlights Hubble’s potential to image faint, previously unknown asteroids and represents a new approach to finding asteroids in astronomical archives spanning decades, which may be effectively applied to other datasets. In addition to illustrating Hubble’s value as an asteroid hunter, it also reinforced the public’s interest in contributing towards scientific endeavours and the value of citizen science efforts.

Next, the project will explore the 1031 streaks of previously unknown asteroids to characterise their orbits and study their properties, such as their sizes and rotation periods. As most of these asteroid streaks were captured by Hubble many years ago, it is not possible to follow them up now to determine their orbits [1]. However, using Hubble, astronomers can use the parallax effect to determine the distance to the unknown asteroids and put constraints on their orbits. As Hubble moves around the Earth, it changes its point of view while observing the asteroid which also moves on its own orbit. By knowing the position of Hubble during the observation and measuring the curvature of the streaks, scientists can determine the distances to the asteroids and estimate the shapes of their orbits. Some of the longer Hubble observations facilitate the measurement of a light curve [2] for the asteroids, from which the team can measure their rotation periods and infer their shapes.
Notes

[1] Compared to the bright stars and Solar System planets which Hubble regularly tracks, most of the asteroids are very faint and move very quickly, making them difficult to spot. As they will have drifted a very long way since first being seen, the likelihood that predictions of their orbits will be exact enough to capture the object in Hubble’s precise field of view is too slim.

[2] A light curve is a plot of the amount of light seen from an object over a period of time. As the amount of light rises and falls, it traces out a curve, which tells astronomers when and by how much the object’s brightness changes. This can tell them about some of the object’s properties. In this case, as the small, irregularly-shaped asteroids rotate and tumble in space, they expose larger or smaller surfaces to the Sun, and the amount of light reflected towards us changes.
More information

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

The international team of astronomers in this study consists of S. Kruk (European Space Agency and Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik), P. G. Martín (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), M. Popescu ( Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy), B. Merín (European Space Agency), M. Mahlke (Université Côte d’Azur, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur), B. Carry (Université Côte d’Azur, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur), R. Thomson (Google Cloud), S. Karadağ (Google), J. Durán (RHEA for European Space Agency), E. Racero (SERCO for European Space Agency), F. Giordano (SERCO for European Space Agency), D. Baines (Quasar Science Resources for European Space Agency), G. de Marchi (European Space Agency), and R. Laureijs (European Space Agency).

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Kruk (ESA/ESTEC), Hubble Asteroid Hunter citizen science team, M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble)
 
Hubble Measures Potential Isolated Black Hole Roaming The Galaxy:

View: https://youtu.be/eOSv-FhaDOA

 
Last edited:
NASA and SpaceX are studying a Hubble telescope boost, adding 15 to 20 years of life

NASA announced Thursday that it plans to study the possibility of using SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle to boost the aging Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit.

The study will also look at potential servicing options, although nothing like the detailed instrument replacements and major upgrades performed during Hubble servicing missions with NASA's space shuttle. Rather, engineers from NASA and SpaceX will assess the feasibility of replacing the gyroscopes that control the pointing of the telescope. Only three of the spacecraft's six gyroscopes remain in working order.
 
This is a pic of a section of a solar panel from the Hubble Space Telescope, which was brought back to earth after the repair mission in 1993. The panel had 100s of impact craters, ranging from microns to millimetres in diameter, after 2 years in space. https://esa.int/Safety_Security/Hubble_s_impactful_life_alongside_space_debris… 6/
View: https://mobile.twitter.com/akaschs/status/1534631771693801474
so with these recurring system issues is it possible that a small millimeter piece of space debris slammed through the outer shell and damaged a computer?we wouldn't know about it unless we went up there to see. but is it a possibility? some of it does in fact travel at 14,000+ mph.......
 
Isn't Hubble down to one working gyro? It seems unlikely to me it has enough life left in it to make a boost worth while.
 
so with these recurring system issues is it possible that a small millimeter piece of space debris slammed through the outer shell and damaged a computer?we wouldn't know about it unless we went up there to see. but is it a possibility? some of it does in fact travel at 14,000+ mph.......

We'd know. They e been able to diagnose most of the issues and they don't seem to be impact-related. The 2021 issue is related to voltage supply and seems more likely to be just general age-related decay.

Isn't Hubble down to one working gyro? It seems unlikely to me it has enough life left in it to make a boost worth while.

Three (of six originals). It can work with just two, with some limitations.

But at least some of the thinking here is that they might be able to do a servicing mission either in conjunction with a reboost or separately. The gyros have been replaced once and possibly could be replaced again.

OTOH, Crew Dragon isn't exactly the perfect platform for a servicing mission, so a lot of development money might be needed.
 

Similar threads

Please donate to support the forum.

Back
Top Bottom