NASA has released the first images from the upgraded Hubble telescope. Looks like the iconic orbiting observatory is working just fine after its May upgrade which saw it get new batteries, gyroscopes and and a thorough overhaul of its instruments.
It also got a new camera and a new spectrograph from the astronauts who spent five days under Hubble’s hood. The upgrade, almost certain to be Hubble’s last, should keep it producing tip-top images until 2014. It’s taken a few months to focus, test and calibrate the instruments, but by the looks of this snap of the Butterfly Nebula, it’s been worth the wait.
Still, while everyone is slapping each other on the back, it’s worth remembering that it took a hell of a lot of fighting to get the repair done. Over time, a series of glitches had taken their toll on the telescope, and back in 2003, astronomers were already lobbying for Hubble to be serviced to help it live beyond its original decommissioning date of 2010.
The following year, President George W. Bush gave NASA a sweeping new vision for human space exploration which left Hubble as an unfortunate budget casualty – at that stage it was likely to be dead by 2007.
But scientists would not give up on their prized ‘scope. The NASA administrator at the time, Sean O’Keefe, said that a manned repair mission was too risky in the wake of the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster, so there was a huge effort to work out whether a robotic servicing mission could do the job.
Nope, said a National Academies panel at the end of 2004 – you need astronauts to do the job. But the NASA budget unveiled the following year had no cash for a manned mission, effectively signing Hubble’s death warrant.
It was October 2006 before Hubble’s fortunes improved and a manned servicing mission was finally approved.
One key player in the campaigning for Hubble was Barbara Mikulski, Democrat senator for Maryland, now chairwoman of the Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Subcommittee that funds NASA. Today, Mikulski gloried in her victory by declaring, “I fought for the Hubble repair mission because Hubble is the people’s telescope”. Goodness me. Meanwhile, Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said that the telescope is “significantly more powerful than ever, well-equipped to last into the next decade.”
According to NASA, future observations will range from “studying the population of Kuiper Belt objects at the fringe of our solar system to surveying the birth of planets around other stars and probing the composition and structure of extrasolar planet atmospheres.”