How was the Hubble telescope invented, what gave them the idea to make such a thing , did any telescopes come before that helped them develop this idea?
Has the technology world gained anything from the invention , has it lead to anything greater being invented ?
The Hubble telescope is _not_ an "invention." There is nothing new about it: it is a natural evolution from trends in astronomy going back centuries. It is a normal modern research telescope, only unusual in that it is placed in an orbiting satellite, so that it is above the turbulence of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Te original Hubble telescope had a major optical flaw and produced very poor images. This led scientists to develop sophisticated image processing techniques to extract sharp images from fuzzy ones. These techniques are used widely today in medical imaging.
Also, how was the telescope transported to, and setup in orbit?
(Main question is the actual QUESTION ^^^^^^)
Thanks guys, take care.
By having the HST in orbit, the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere are avoided in the images.
When taking stellar images from the ground, atmospheric vibrations, dust and clouds, among other things, can have serious debilitating effects on the quality of the images. Since none of these atmospheric phenomena are present in Hubble’s orbit, the images taken are of much higher quality.
The HST was placed in orbit from a Space Shuttle, like a satellite. Since then, a number of Shuttle missions were launched to repair the telescope.
Can someone explain this to me in a nutshell please. 18 years they release this machine and still taking picture wtf?
How come all the money in Iraq and they cant build a more powerful and sophisticated one?
So, 12 billion dollars (FY 2008 dollars) gives you 18+ years of operation. Four servicing missions have been flown to it with new instruments and repairs. So it’s not strictly an 18 year old instrument. The fifth and final servicing mission is currently scheduled for Spring 2009. Many of the instruments will be repaired or replaced with newer and better ones.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be bigger and better. But as it’s mostly an infrared telescope, it will not exactly be a replacement for the HST.
Civilian and Military budgets seldom can be interchanged.
In my opinion, abandoning the visual part of the spectrum with a space telescope is a mistake. We should put a cheap 2 meter telescope up to replace the HST before it dies in 2013 or so. Instead of spending 12 billion over 18 years, it makes much more sense to spend more like 200-400 million for a 5 year (Star Trek like) mission. I’d put maybe four cheaper visible light telescopes up. One would be for visible light with filters – like the ACS camera. Another would be an imaging spectrometer. And the third & fourth would be geared for measuring the distances to nearby stars. None would stay in Earth orbit – they’d be in Earth trailing or leading solar orbits. In particular, the astrometry scopes would get as far from each other as possible, for simultaneous measurement of single stars to get unambiguous distance values.
i aint no genius but i am struggling to grasp the fact that the hubble space telescope can take photo’s from like back in time… i just read an article on yahoo… and it makes little sense to me.
Well you’re looking back in time every time you look at the moon! Light from the moon takes 2.56 seconds to reach us so every time you look at it, that’s how it looked like 2.56 seconds ago (not currently). The moon isn’t even that far away either when you compare it to other things in the universe.
So you can imagine how far back in time we are looking when we look through Hubble. Because Hubble can see so much into the distance, the images we are getting have taken many years to reach us, so we are actually seeing what happened many years ago.
Light travels at 300,000 kilometres per second (186,000 miles per second). You can imagine how far light travels in one year then. Lots! That should give you an idea of how big the universe is when it could take 4.22 ‘light years’ just to see the nearest star out of our solar system.
Yep. The universe is pretty big lol!
I did a rough calculation to see how powerful a telescope magnification must be, to see our own Earth from 20 Light Years away. The detail is written here :
http://scienceray.com/astronomy/how-powerful-a-telescope-must-be-to-see-earth-from-20-light-years-away/
Just to put things into perspective, I want to ask:
1. How powerful the magnification of Hubble Space Telescope?
2. How powerful the planned magnification of James Webb Space Telescope ?
3. When do you think we will have telescope as powerful as described in the article ?
Telescopes are not measured by their magnifying power, since that varies depending on the eyepiece or camera used. What is more important is their light gathering power, determined by the area of their objective (main lens or mirror), and their resolution, determined by its diameter. Spotting a planet close to a distant star is a complex matter, depending on the size of the planet, its distance from the star, and the brightness of the star, as well as the distance of the planet. Seeing a tiny speck of reflected light next to a brilliant star is a major optical challenge
Read an article on line about this and I am not sure I understand how it works; the article actually referred to the telescopes ability to photograph "back in time" and it lost me completely. I mean, does the telescope view what’s out there now and calculate backwards to come to a conclusion as to what the universe was like then? Anyone who can shed light, please do.
This is an effect caused by the speed of light and the vast distances in space.
For example, it takes about 8 minutes for light from the sun to reach the earth. So when we look at the sun, we’re actually seeing what it looked like when the light left it, 8 minutes ago. If the sun suddenly vanished or exploded, it would be 8 minutes before we could see it!
If we extend this to stars and galaxies that are very, very far away, the same holds true! The nearest star to us is about 4 Light years away. That means, it takes 4 years for the light to travel to us. So when we look at that star today, that is what it actually looked like 4 years after the light left that star!
Continuing in distance, we can see stars that are thousands and thousands of light years away. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is roughly 100,000 light years all the way across. So some stars we can see, we are actually seeing what they looked like almost 100,000 years ago.
And then there are other galaxies we can see, and these can be millions and millions of light years away. The furthest galaxies we’ve seen are about 13 BILLION light years away. So when we look at those galaxies, that is what they looked like 13 billion years ago!
We really are looking back in time! We won’t know what that galaxy looks like at THIS instant for another 13 billion years, once the light that leaves them right now reaches us at that point!
So, the farther away you look into space, the farther back in time you can look! Of course, there’s a limit to how far we can see: you can’t see farther than the age of the universe! This is because there hasn’t been enough time for light to travel that far. So if we get the distance of the farthest object that we can see, then we can roughly find out a minimum age of the universe! Scientists have estimated it at being a little over 13 billion years old, so that’s about as far back as we can look.
Hope this helped explain it for you!
I have seen the pictures it takes but how?
It’s basically an electronic CCD, just like any digital camera.
Maintaining the guiding accurate to a fraction of an arcsecond is done using feedback — by observing fairly bright stars near the field being observed, and nudging the pointing with gyroscopes.
I read that the Hubble has taken pictures of the earliest form of the universe that it has ever gotten, 600 million years after the Big Bang. If the universe now is somewhere like 32 billion years after the Big Bang, how does that work? Be kind for my ignorance.
All light you see is from the past, because light takes time to go somewhere. It’s just for most objects we look at, that time is relatively short. Light from across the room (say 3 meters away) takes 10 nanoseconds to get to you. So what you see is not what is happening right now, but what happened 10 nanoseconds ago. Of course, that’s such a short time that for most purposes it makes no difference at all. (It makes a difference for atomic clocks, which do keep time down to the nanosecond. A clock in the US trying to synchronize with a clock in Europe has to account for the fact that it takes millions of nanoseconds for the message from the clock in Europe to get here).
Light takes a little over a second to get here from the moon. So when you look at the moon, you are seeing it as it was about a second ago.
When you look at the sun, you see it as it was 8 minutes ago, not right now.
When we look at the more distant planets in our solar system, the information is hours old.
And the stars are so far away that it took their light years to get here.
Edit to Glen: I’m not quite sure what distinction you see between that answer (which says light takes time to travel a distance, so the light we see is old), and the other answers such as mine (which says light takes time to travel a distance, so the light we see is old).
Yahoo! News reports: "The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the earliest image yet of the universe — just 600 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a toddler."
How is this possible?
The objects pictured were around 12.5 billion light years away, while the Universe is around 13 billion years old. We saw the objects as they appeared when the light left them.
The Hubble Space Telescope has excellent resolving power because there is no atmospheric distortion of the light. The Hubble deep field camera uses the 2.4 m diameter mirror to collect light from distant galaxies that formed very early in the history of the universe. How far apart can two galaxies be from each other if they are 11 billion light-years away from Earth and are barely resolved by the Hubble Telescope using visible light with a wavelength of 470 nm?
Please, point it at the Moon where we left all the spack junk when we landed, i would like to see the latter?