NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and that seems a long time for University of Arizona astronomer Daniel Stark.
“I remember, in the beginning of Hubble, I was in grade school. Now I’m a professor here and it’s still producing cutting-edge science.”
Of course, 25 years is a nanosecond blink in the life of the galaxies Stern studies. He has used the space telescope to peer 13 billion years into the past, almost to the edge of the creation of the cosmos 13.5 billion years ago.
Hubble “has completely changed our view of the universe,” said Rodger Thompson, who led a Steward Observatory team that designed and built an infrared camera called the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS).
Astronauts installed it on the second servicing run to the telescope by NASA’s Space Shuttle.
“When it launched, we were sure of one thing — the expansion of the universe was slowing,” said Thompson. The opposite was true.
Hubble’s images helped two teams of scientists discover that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. “Acceleration completely changed cosmology and our view of the universe and it changed physics itself,” said Thompson.
Hubble also expanded our view of the universe to within 500 million years of the Big Bang, using the infrared technology developed by Thompson and deputy investigator Marcia Rieke.
“When we began,” said Rieke, “the most distant galaxy we knew of was halfway to the Big Bang.”
Hubble’s original science goals did not include its major programs today. “No one had thought of Hubble as a platform for finding out the limits of the edge of the universe,” she said.
And no one thought of using it to define the atmospheres of exoplanets. When it was launched, the only planets astronomers knew about revolved around our sun.
“Those are two scientific themes that weren’t on the table when Hubble was launched,” Rieke said.
While scientists were enthralled with the information Hubble’s images provided, the world at large thrilled to its dazzling processed photographs of star-forming dust clouds and panoramas of galaxies in deep space.
Many of those images, including the iconic “Pillars of Creation,” were processed at Arizona State University by Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen of the School of Earth and Space Exploration.
ASU Regents’ Professor Rogier Windhorst has been a member of Hubble’s science team since it was transported into space in the cargo bay of Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990.
Rieke said building NICMOS to give Hubble its first infrared capability was “a great adventure.”
It was slated for installation on the first space-shuttle servicing mission in 1993, but that one had to be used to fix a major flaw in Hubble’s primary mirror.
NICMOS was installed in 1997.
Now Rieke and her team at Steward Observatory are on a new adventure. They built a Near Infrared Camera (NIRcam) for the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s bigger and more technologically advanced successor. It is set to launch in October 2018.
It will look even deeper into space/time. It will be more capable of defining the composition and atmospheres of exoplanets. It will, no doubt, be used for scientific themes “not on the table” right now.
And it will allow astronomers such as Stark and Windhorst to study the evolution and formation of the very earliest galaxies.
Stark says he can’t wait. In the meantime, he hopes for another good five years from Hubble, whose original mission was slated to end in 2005.
