(photo: "Cat's Eye Nebula" from NASA. Title link above: NASA.gov.) The Hubble could have a new lease on life. Yesterday NASA announced that our telescope in space will be once again, and for a final time, refurbished. That is good news for everyone, including our friends around the world: For example I clipped an article from:
bbc.co.uk BBC News
Last Updated: Tuesday, 31 October 2006, 19:54 GMT
Hubble telescope will get upgrade
Dr Griffin told Nasa employees that recent modifications to the shuttle launch system meant it was now safe to send a crew to work on Hubble.
"We are going to add a shuttle servicing mission - to the Hubble space telescope - to the shuttle's manifest to be flown before [the orbiter] retires," Dr Griffin told an audience at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland where the Hubble programme is managed.
The Hubble telescope orbits the earth every 97 minutes. As the Hubble site describes it, "Like a well-oiled machine, Hubble's optics, science instruments, and spacecraft systems work together to capture light from the cosmos, convert it into digital data, and transmit it back to Earth."The U.S. space program has enormous value for the entire human race. Over time the effort, naturally and of necessity, became a truly international effort. Thus we cherish and nurture the Hubble for the rest of the world as well as America. MSNBC carried an excellent story on their very content-rich "Space News" page about the approval by NASA of a final Hubble repair mission. The bottom line is that the Hubble will be able to operate with greatly enhanced capability "well into the next decade."
What is so inspiring about "Space"? The subtitle of the Hubble site is "Out of the Ordinary. . . Out of This World." These words and the Hubble image to the left capture for me what has drawn me to the subject of space since I was a child. As children our awareness of ourselves as part of a larger reality grows over time as we acquire new information and become aware of our spititual sides. We come to understand how the physical universe is constituted. We come to truly believe that the moon and stars are real and not magical figments of our imagination; and that the earth orbits the sun, rather than that the sun "comes up." And spiritually with awe, we take these matters - the science - on faith. I have no trouble linking my science and my faith*. They reinforce each other. My adolescent explorations of space via science fiction and science classes enlarged my world view to encompass a "universe," and my "place" as a citizen of Earth.
Previous related S/SW posts:
- Eyes in the Sky
- NASA Needs Protection
- *A Citizen Looks for Answers
- What Works or Doesn't: NASA vs. Our Current President & Co.
My current "creative post" at Southwest Blogger is about the books I read, a "book meme."
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