Yesterday, as if to put an exclamation point on the Independence Day celebrations, the Hubble Space Telescope made its 1,000,000th scientific observation.
This is an artist's concept of that planet, HAT-P-7b. It is a "hot Jupiter" class planet orbiting a star that is much hotter than our sun. Hubble Space Telescope's millionth science observation was trained on this planet to look for the presence of water vapor and to study the planet's atmospheric structure via spectroscopy. (Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Bacon, STScI)
Details after the fold...
On July 4th, 2011 NASA's Hubble Space Telescope peered into the void at a star called GSC 03547-01402 in the Cygnus constellation and tracked the transit of an eclipsing planet called HAT-P-7b. HAT-P-7b, also known as Kepler 2b, was discovered by the Hungarian Automated Telescope Network (HATNet) in 2008 and is 1.4 times the size of Jupiter.
Astronomers pointed Hubble in HAT-P-7b's direction after initial surveys by the Kepler observatory in order to observe its spectral signature and determine the composition of its atmosphere.
Isn't science grand? To be able to scan a planet 1,044 light years away just to see if there is water in its atmosphere. It makes me eternally optimistic. It should bolster your hopes for the future too.