(-05-) Date: 13 January 1995
Subject: Hubble's '94 comeback due in large part to WFPC-2
From: The JPL Universe
RECOVERING HUBBLE
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope made a spectacular comeback in
1994 after its primary camera, the Wide Field and Planetary
Camera, was redesigned and installed to compensate for flaws
caused by the telescope's primary mirror.
The second-generation camera, built by JPL, carried corrective
optics that fully restored the planned imaging capability of HST,
an achievement that sent ripples through the scientific community
and awed the public when the first pictures using the new camera
were unveiled in January 1994. Dr. John Trauger of JPL spearheaded
the redesign effort.
The first images released on Jan. 13, 1994, revealed crystal-
clear shots of galaxies at the distance of the Virgo cluster some
65 million light-years away. Other images included the first well-
resolved shots of newly forming stars in the nearby Orion nebula
and a previously unseen structure in the exploding star Eta
Carinae, located in one of the Magellanic clouds just outside the
Milky Way galaxy.
As the year progressed, Hubble's WFPC-2 took part in one of the
most fantastic events in the history of planetary science, when
fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 began bombarding Jupiter
over a six-day interval in mid-July.
Other significant events for the Wide Field and Planetary
Camera-2 included the first accurate measurements of the distance
to a remote galaxy in the Virgo cluster.
Scientists determined the distance of M100 to be 56 million
light-years away, based on their measurements of newly discovered
Cepheid variable stars too faint to be seen by ground-based
telescopes. The accomplishment represented a major milestone in
one of the Hubble Space Telescope's primary science goals-- to
determine the Hubble constant--the ratio of the velocity of
recession of galaxies to their distances, as proposed by Edwin
Hubble early in the 20th century.
"Hubble is allowing us to make observations in a few short
months that used to take a decade or more to complete," said Dr.
Barry Madore of the NASA Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
and a member of the Hubble Extragalactic Database at Caltech.
"This was an objective that was nothing more than a wish and a
dream to astronomers five years ago."
In later developments, a team of scientists from the Princeton
Institute for Advanced Study and the Hubble Telescope Science
Institute used WFPC-2 to study red dwarf stars, which were thought
to constitute perhaps as much as 90 percent of the invisible, so-
called dark matter in the universe. Their observations, too,
turned the astronomical community upside down.
WFPC-2 closed out the year with another spectacular
observation. In December, the telescope returned images of Saturn,
which revealed a rare storm sweeping across the planet's upper
atmosphere. The photos provided the science community with new
details about the effects of Saturn's winds on storm systems.
As 1995 gets under way, astronomers are scrambling for
observing time to turn Hubble's powerful telescopic eyes on new
science targets within the solar system and far beyond it. In
fact, some astronomers are predicting that the orbiting telescope
will be able to peer back at galaxies as far as 150 million light-
years away and, before long, provide answers to some of the most
fundamental questions in astronomy today.
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- T o d d E. V a n H o o s e a r -
``'''vanhoose@lalaland.cl.msu.edu - vanhoose@msu.edu - vanhoose@lalaland.cl.msu.edu
(._.) Michigan State University - East Lansing, MI USA
(_) Computer Laboratory - Department of Communication
`---' <A HREF="http://lalaland.cl.msu.edu/~vanhoose/">My Home Page</A>
"Give me ambiguity or give me something else."
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