_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [115]
Kathy Thornton and her crewmates returned to Earth, and Hubble managers began chewing their nails. They now had to wait to determine whether the orbital telescope surgery was as successful as they dared hope.
Power was fed to Hubble’s controls. The space observatory accepted its checkout commands with a thumbs-up. The orbiting telescope was alive. Astronomers gathered before the huge television screen monitoring Hubble’s cameras in the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. The control center was bathed in the same tension as a busy maternity ward.
The master television screen flickered, then its picture steadied, and there it was—the first image from the rebuilt Hubble. Star AGK +81 D226… clear and sharp. It was perfection, and those in the room stared at one another until the tension was gone and applause, cheering, and backslapping began. Astronomers hugged one another fiercely, and NASA’s top scientist, Ed Weiler, told those of us in the media, “It’s beyond our wildest expectations.” From nearsightedness to super vision, this was the new Hubble, and NBC space correspondent Robert Hager quipped, “It’s amazing what you can do with a $629 million pair of contact lenses.”
Before the astronauts’ rescue-and-repair flight, Hubble could see out to four billion light-years from Earth. Now the massive space telescope’s “vision reach” had tripled to twelve billion light years. Its new clarity would fulfill the promise of the massive orbiting telescope—its lens peering almost to the beginning of time.
Hubble fired the most doubting imaginations, because in the space telescope’s twenty-year lifetime it would answer many eager questions.
Were there other planets outside our solar system? Hubble answered yes as it showed astronomers hundreds in our galactic neighborhood.
How old is the universe? Hubble says 13.9 billion years.
Is the speed of light really the ultimate velocity? Or will we find unanticipated matter and energy that travel faster? What exactly is dark matter? Does it really make up most of the universe? And what happens to the trillions of tons of matter that vanish into the maw of black holes? What are the white gushers in space pouring vast amounts of subatomic particles into our universe—with no identifiable source or known reason? And is the universe expanding? Hubble says yes as it observes exploding stars in galaxies whose light was emitted when the universe was half its present age, and the space telescope reports the universe’s expansion is accelerating—being driven by an unknown force.
With Hubble still marching into the future, with astronauts planning one more maintenance-and-repair mission so the magnificent space telescope can study and photograph the first stars and galaxies formed twelve billion years ago, will we come to understand our place in the order of being? And of most importance, will we every answer the small child’s question, “How high is up?”
Stay tuned.
TWENTY-SIX
As the Century Turned
One of NASA’s oldest dreams was to build a permanent space station. It would, in some minds, be the beginning of an orbiting space city, a gravity-free outpost where earthlings could multiply, raise families, live longer, and produce the stuff and foods needed for self-sufficiency in orbit.
NASA had a small taste of operating its own space station in 1973. That’s