There has been a lot of attention on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) this week, including posts here at Daily Kos. I'm going to try to make this one worth your time. I've been putting together a round up of news stories that have keyed in on the HST's 25 years in space, from its troubled beginnings to its current and final configuration. The images coming down from the HST have become iconic. The information obtained by the HST has changed our understanding of the universe, and challenged our theories about the fundamental nature of the Cosmos.
But if there's only one article you have time for, it's one that was written back in 2007. It's one of the most evocative pieces I've seen about a machine that exhausts our supply of superlatives. Follow me past the Orange Omnilepticon, and I'll lead you to that and much more.
While known for political commentary, sports stories, and a number of other interests, Charles P. Pierce back in 2007 wrote a long paean to the Hubble Space Telescope that almost reads like poetry, a kind of worship. There are many things humans have done on this Earth (and beyond it now), but the Hubble Space Telescope is one of those singular creations that changes everything that follows, if only by putting everything in a new context.
The article is titled A Journey to the Beginning of Time. It's not just that the Hubble sees farther than we've seen before, it's that it is also looking back in time. Distances in space are measured in Light Years, the distance light travels in one Earth year. When the HST looks at something 4 billion light years away, it is seeing light that left that object 4 billion years ago.
Think of it like this. If the universe is like a reel of movie film, all we know about the movie is what we can see with our naked senses in one single frame out of a story that has already stretched out over billions and billions of frames. The HST allows us here in this one frame we call "Now" to look back at the earlier frames in the movie, and from that we are getting an idea of the overall story so far - and where the story might be going from here. But enough of my nattering; here's some Pierce:
Every ninety-seven minutes, the Hubble Telescope sails around the earth and takes a good, long look at deepest space. It squints its eye and transports us to a place ten billion light-years away, to a world before science and faith, before art and reason and religion, before time itself.
You can't see the beginning of time if you just look straight at it.
The most sensitive receptors in the human eye are along its edge. They deal with dim light and shadows, with the grays and mysteries and maybe-maybe-nots of the perceivable world. Nearer the center of the eye, there are receptors accustomed to dealing with bright lights and with colors, but these become useless in the dark. Look straight through a telescope and you can't see anything. You have to look slit-eyed and peripheral, the way gunfighters do, or soldiers fighting at night. If you want to see the beginning of time, you have to look at it indirectly.
You look, sidelong from the earth, through an ungainly beast, a concoction of solar panels and instruments and antennae and mirrors and sensors with a wide, flat door at one end--an inverted tin duck forty-four feet long, weighing as much as seven Buicks. Nearly four hundred miles up, it sails around the planet once every ninety-seven minutes. Every so often, the duck dances in its orbit, locking onto guide stars, and takes a good, long look out into space, which also is a good, long look back through time because light moves faster than history does, which we know because Einstein was right. It drinks in all the starlight it can, and then it sends the starlight back to earth.
Read the whole thing, and you'll begin to grasp that the HST is more than amazing pictures. It reaches into the human spirit even as it reaches out into time, and shows us things about both that boggle the imagination.
Have you ever lain on your back on a summer night, in a really dark place with clear skies and no inconstant Moon to outshine the stars? Have you stared long enough to catch the random meteors that are always striking the atmosphere? Have you gazed long enough that those tiny points of light suddenly shift, and suddenly you're not looking up and out - you're looking down and in?
Man's machines now go where we can't (yet) and bring back treasures. The HST is something different in part because it was intended that humans would not worship it from afar, but instead would journey to it to periodically repair, refurbish, and upgrade it. There's a certain school of thought that says we should save Space for the machines alone. It's cheaper and less risky to send them out; humans need too much care and feeding, and they get in the way. But, the synergy of man and machine amplifies the strengths of each while compensating for their weaknesses.
The HST would have failed in its purpose if astronauts had not been able to ride the Shuttle up for a repair mission after it was found all too fallible humans had given it a flawed mirror to see with. Richard Hollingham interviewed Astronaut Story Musgrave for the BBC to talk about the HST and the spacewalk that rescued it.
Backed by hundreds of engineers, technicians and controllers on the ground, during the 11-day mission, the Shuttle crew carried out five back-to-back EVAs, notching-up some 35 hours and 28 minutes outside the spacecraft. Musgrave and Hoffman carried out three spacewalks, alternating with their colleagues Kathryn Thornton and Tom Akers.
If the problems with Hubble represented the worst of Nasa, then STS-61 showed the agency at its best. Despite the work involved, Musgrave even had time to appreciate his unique situation.
“You’re never too busy if you’re an explorer,” he says. “You’re looking at the Earth go by, you’re looking at the aurora, at the stars and you’re experiencing the doing itself. There’s no such thing as too busy.”
With a fully functioning Hubble Space Telescope released back into its orbit, politicians who had been so critical of Nasa became the first to congratulate the returning astronauts. In the years since, Hubble’s near-disastrous early years have been largely forgotten.
Alas, we no longer fly so high; the surviving shuttles have all gone to museums, and the future of manned spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit depends on continued funding and development of new vehicles, a dubious proposition for America given its current political climate, though others may continue on the path we took part in blazing. The Hubble's fate is to continue working as long as its systems hold up. There are enough proposals for research to keep 10 or a 100 Hubbles busy. Once there was a hope that it could someday be retired and returned to Earth by the Shuttle or its successor to take its rightful place in a museum; now it might instead be deliberately tossed back to burn up in the atmosphere when it can no longer provide useful data.
There's a short BBC video here that gives a brief over view of the HST, and one here showing that the HST is finding things in our own back yard here in the Solar System worth investigating. The New York Times featured a spread of photos picked as favorites by people working in Astronomy and elsewhere, along with the stories behind them.
New Scientist has a brief celebratory article on the HST's origins and other contributions it has made. Jonathan Amos at the BBC has put together a longer tribute with several outstanding photos, a recap of what the HST is working on as it goes ahead, and a peek at its eventual successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. But if you can't get enough of things HST, this collaborative website is featuring a year of events to celebrate the HST in its 25th year. NASA has also put together a website full of fascinating things about the Hubble. Exploring them all could take hours of time... If you'd like to go right to the eye candy, here's a NASA portfolio of amazing Hubble images.
NPR also has observed the Hubble's anniversary. Adam Frank offers up 25 Years On: How Hubble's Vision Became Our Own.
Now, at a time when American leadership in science is being willfully abandoned for narrow, short-term expediencies — and other nations are picking up the mantle of discovery — it's important to recognize exactly what we did in building that remarkable machine. Thousands of years from now, all our names will have been long forgotten. And all the names of our famous football players and pop stars and politicians will be forgotten, too.
But Hubble will be remembered.
If human beings are still around then, what Hubble did to us — and what it did for us — will endure. That's because the true legacy of the Hubble Space Telescope, its true gift to the future, is the one we have given ourselves. We have seen farther. Across an ocean of space and time and galaxies, we have seen where we truly are and, therefore, what we truly are. If we want, that's the kind of truth that can make us all free.