Education News

The Hubble Space Telescope is located at the outer edges of the atmosphere, in a circular orbit around the Earth about 593 km above sea level it takes to travel between 96 and 97 minutes. It was launched on April 24, 1990 as a joint project of NASA and ESA. The telescope can achieve optical resolutions greater than 0, the second of arc. It weighs around 11,000 kilos, is cylindrical and has a length of 13.2 m and a maximum diameter of 4.2 meters.

The reflector telescope and has two mirrors, with the main 2, 4 meters in diameter. To explore the sky incorporates several spectrometers and three cameras, a narrow field of view for shooting small areas of land (because of its remoteness faint glow), another wide field to produce images of planets and third infrared. By two solar panels generate electricity that powers the camera, the four engines used to orient and stabilize the telescope and the refrigeration of the infrared camera and spectrometer operating at -180 º C.

Since its launch, the telescope has received several visits from astronauts to correct various malfunctions and installing additional equipment. Friction with the atmosphere (very dim at that point), the telescope is losing weight very slowly, gaining speed, so each time it is visited, the space shuttle has to push a slightly higher orbit.

The advantage of having a telescope above the atmosphere lies mainly in that it absorbs certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation striking the Earth, especially in the infrared that obscures the images obtained, leading to poor quality and limiting the scope , or resolution, ground-based telescopes. In addition, they are also affected by meteorological factors (presence of clouds) and light pollution caused by the large urban settlements, which reduces the chances of ground-based telescopes location.

Since it was launched into orbit in 1990 to avoid distortion of the atmosphere – historically, the problem of all ground-based telescopes – Hubble has enabled scientists to see the universe with a clarity never achieved. In their observations, the astronomers confirmed the existence of black holes, clarified ideas about the birth of the universe in a huge explosion, the Big Bang occurred about 13,700 million years, and revealed new galaxies and systems in the far corners of cosmos. Hubble scientists also helped to establish that the solar system is much younger than the universe.

At first it was thought to bring the telescope back to Earth every five years for maintenance, and also have a peacekeeping mission in space in each period. Later, seeing the complications and risks involved return the instrument to Earth and re-launch, it was decided that there would be a peacekeeping mission in space three years, being the first one scheduled for December 1993. When shortly after being launched, it was discovered that Hubble was suffering from an aberration due to an error in construction, officials began counting the days for the first servicing mission, hoping that the error could be corrected optics.

Starting in the first servicing mission system was installed to correct the telescope’s optics, sacrificing for this instrument (the fast photometer), the Hubble has proven to be an instrument without equal, capable of affecting observations continuously our ideas about the universe.

Hubble provided dramatic images of the collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994 as well as evidence of the existence of planets orbiting other stars. Some of the observations that led to the current model of the expanding universe with this telescope were obtained. The theory that most galaxies host a black hole at its core has been partially confirmed by numerous observations.

In December 1995, the telescope photographed the Hubble Deep Field, a region the size of a thirty-millionth the area of ​​sky that contains several thousand galaxies. A similar picture was taken in the southern hemisphere in 1998 to appreciate significant similarities between the two, which has reinforced the principle that posits that the structure of the universe is independent of the direction in which you look.

Possibility Related Posts:

• The Formation of the Oceans
  The formation of the oceans In the early twentieth century thought the Earth and other planets were formed from matter pulled from the Sun and circulated the image of an Earth gradual cooling proces...