New High Res Images From the Refurbished Hubble Telescope

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, rebuilt by astronauts, has demonstrated its new powers with a stunning set of images.

The Hubble was repaired and refurbished earlier this year in a series of tense spacewalks by astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis, all of whom attended a packed briefing Wednesday morning at NASA headquarters. They fixed two broken instruments and installed a new camera, a spectrograph, new batteries and gyroscopes. Months later, everything appears to be working splendidly.

The agency made sure that the newest Hubble images packed some visual punch. The most dramatic come from the Wide Field Camera 3, which the astronauts installed after a protracted struggle with a stuck bolt that threatened to keep the camera from ever being used.

One image shows planetary nebula NGC 6302, more commonly known as the Butterfly Nebula. It’s a dying star ejecting two “wings” of gas. For the past two millennia, the gas has been spreading outward, and the “butterfly” is now trillions of miles in diameter.

“It portends what our solar system is going to look like in about 4 billion years,” Edward J. Weiler , NASA’s head of science, said in an interview. “We’re seeing the sun’s death in 4 billion years.”

Another image shows a cluster of galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet. Two of the galaxies are melding like fried eggs plopped together in a pan. Two more will eventually join them to form a single colossal galaxy.

“You see how this gives you new eyes,” astrophysicist Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute said after the briefing. “We see this incredible resolution in the visible and then we see the same thing with the same kind of resolution in the infrared. That blew me away.”

The Hubble was launched in 1990 but initially suffered from an aberration in the primary mirror that left images fuzzy. A repair mission three years later fixed the problem, and four more servicing missions have kept the telescope functioning despite the corrosive environment of low Earth orbit.

No more repair missions are contemplated, however. It is unclear how long the Hubble can function before its instruments, gyroscopes and batteries fail, but NASA hopes to milk it for at least five years.

“We have the birth of a new telescope,” Weiler said. “There’s no reason this thing can’t last at least five years, perhaps as much as 10, with a big emphasis on perhaps. It is a 19-year-old system, after all.”

Sources: Hubble Site

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