On Wednesday, Hubble Space Telescope program officials will present some new science (March 30).
According to NASA, the nearly 32-year-old telescope will make “one for the record books” and a “exciting new observation.” Given that the Hubble Space Telescope’s work ranges from exoplanets to galaxies to measuring the expansion of the universe, predicting what that discovery might be is difficult. (The multiobservatory team was awarded the Nobel Prize for this last bit (opens in new tab).)
NASA has provided little additional information, other than to say that the “Hubble result not only extends our understanding of the universe, but also creates an exciting area of research for Hubble’s future work with NASA’s newly launched James Webb Space Telescope.”
Hubble is about to mark the 25th anniversary of its launch from the space shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990. Hubble was the first telescope designed to be visited in space by astronauts for repairs, replacement parts, and technology updates with new instruments. In December 1993, astronauts made the first orbital visit to Hubble. There have been five astronaut servicing missions to Hubble, including that one.
Webb launched on December 25 and is currently aligning its instruments and mirrors in preparation for observational work, which is set to begin in June. OnzineArticles shares that Hubble is about to mark the 25th anniversary of its launch from the space shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990.
In recent months, scientists from the Webb telescope team have emphasised how Hubble’s decades of observations are serving as a guidepost for the newly launched telescope.
Although Webb is billed as Hubble’s successor, NASA officials have stated that Hubble will remain operational at least until the mid-2020s. However, Hubble experienced a problem in October 2021 that forced its instruments offline for several weeks before returning to full operations in December. In July 2021, the observatory also recovered from a major glitch.
Astronauts on the space shuttle used to service Hubble every few years, but that work came to an end when the space shuttle programme was retired in 2011. Hubble’s last servicing mission was in 2009.
Webb will not benefit from such visits because it is much further away, operating at a stable gravitational point known as Lagrange 2, 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometres) from Earth.
Several of Hubble’s most recent images have been of galaxies. Examining a spiral galaxy that lies beneath part of the Virgo Cluster (of which our Milky Way is also a part) and imaging the dusty “eye” of another galaxy similar to our own are two examples.