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Seven NASA astronauts are eagerly looking forward to a risky, but pivotal, shuttle flight to the Hubble Space Telescope this fall. Veteran shuttle commander Scott Altman and his crew are preparing to launch in early October aboard the Atlantis orbiter on what is expected to be NASA's final service call on the iconic space observatory. The telescope passed its 100,000th orbit around Earth on Monday. "What we want to do, though, is refurbish the Hubble so that it can operate as long as possible," Altman said during a series of NASA interviews released on Monday. "We're going to add some...

In commemoration of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope completing its 100,000th orbit in its 18th year of exploration and discovery, scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., have aimed Hubble to take a snapshot of a dazzling region of celestial birth and renewal. Hubble peered into a small portion of the nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074 (upper, left). The region is a firestorm of raw stellar creation, perhaps triggered by a nearby supernova explosion. It lies about 170,000 light-years away near the Tarantula nebula, one of the most active star-forming regions in our Local Group of...

Just logged onto the Space Shuttle schedule and saw that NASA has delayed the Space Shuttle mission to the Hubble Telescope from August 28 to October 8. It looks like a May 22 update, so I'm going to assume this may be breaking news. Anyone have further details?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers have found some matter that had been missing in deep space and say it is strung along web-like filaments that form the backbone of the universe. The ethereal strands of hydrogen and oxygen atoms could account for up to half the matter that scientists knew must be there but simply could not see, the researchers reported on Tuesday. Scientists have long known there is far more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by visible galaxies and stars. Not only is there invisible baryonic matter -- the protons and neutrons that make up atoms...

This is a video of some of earth’s universe grandeur. The song is, God Is So Good, sung by children. The pictures and images were taken by Hubble telescope and the last image is called the Cat’s Eye Nebula.

Hubble servicing mission's launch date threatened BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: March 21, 2008 With the shuttle Endeavour's mission entering the home stretch, shuttle Discovery remains on track for blastoff May 25 to ferry a huge Japanese laboratory module to the international space station. But subsequent near-term flights, including a high-profile mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope, could be delayed, sources say, because of ongoing external tank production issues. The tank used by Endeavour for its current mission was the last in the inventory of tanks built before the...

Using a cosmic magnifying glass to peer into the deepest reaches of space, two teams of astronomers have discovered tiny galaxies that may be among the most distant known. Images suggest that one of the galaxies is so remote that the light now reaching Earth left this starlit body when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was only about 700 million years old. The discoveries are important, notes Tim Heckman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, because they probe a special time in the universe, when the cosmos changed from a place filled with neutral gas to a place ionized by the emergence...

When astronauts overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope this summer, they will leave behind a vastly more powerful orbital observatory to scan the universe. Set to launch aboard NASA's shuttle Atlantis on Aug. 7, the Hubble servicing mission will be the fifth - and final - sortie to upgrade the aging space telescope. "We're not only going up to Hubble to refurbish it, but also to expand its grasp tremendously," said Alan Stern, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate, in a recent briefing. "We expect to make the very best discoveries of the entire two-decade plus Hubble program with the...

Upgraded Hubble telescope to be 90 times as powerful 20:07 08 January 2008 NewScientist.com news service David Shiga, Austin Astronaut Steve Smith works on Hubble during the second servicing mission in 1997. Hubble was specifically built to be serviced in orbit with replaceable parts and instruments (Image: NASA) Space shuttle astronauts will attempt an unprecedented in-orbit repair of key Hubble Space Telescope (HST) instruments during the servicing mission scheduled for August 2008. The repairs, along with the addition of two new instruments, will make Hubble 90 times as powerful as it was after its flawed optics were corrected in 1993....

Astronomers have spotted small galaxies near the beginning of time that resemble ancestors of our own galactic home. The tiny galaxies are about one-tenth to one-twentieth the size of the Milky Way and have 40 times fewer stars. Light from the ancient clusters was emitted about 2 billion years after the Big Bang, the theoretical beginning to the universe that occurred about 13.7 billion years ago. So the galaxies are seen as they existed in a very young universe. The galaxies are not the most distant seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, but astronomers consider them to be the best...

<p>It's the last round-up for the people's telescope. Next August, after 20 years of hype, disappointment, blunders, triumphs and peerless glittering vistas of space and time, and four years after NASA decided to leave the Hubble Space Telescope to die in orbit, setting off public and congressional outrage, a group of astronauts will ride to the telescope aboard the space shuttle Atlantis with wrenches in hand...</p>

A team of astronomers have taken pictures of the stars that are sharper than anything produced by the Hubble telescope, at 50 thousandths of the cost. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), used a technique called “Lucky Imaging” to take the most detailed pictures of stars and nebulae ever produced – using a camera based on the ground. Images from ground-based telescopes are usually blurred by the Earth’s atmosphere - the same effect that makes the stars appear to twinkle when we look at them with the naked eye. The Cambridge/Caltech...

<p>Only 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, a star familiar to human observers detonated and burned with a brightness comparable to that of a crescent moon — an event visible even in broad daylight.</p> <p>The dead star's name may be lost, but its shattered remains are known as the Veil Nebula or Witch's Broom Nebula.</p>

Massive Jupiter is undergoing dramatic atmospheric changes that have never been seen before with the keen "eye" of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Jupiter's turbulent clouds are always changing as they encounter atmospheric disturbances while sweeping around the planet at hundreds of miles per hour. But these Hubble images reveal a rapid transformation in the shape and color of Jupiter's clouds near the equator, marking an entire face of the globe.

Astronomers have discovered an enormous, ghostly ring of dark matter 5 billion light years away — the most blatant evidence to date for the existence of a mysterious substance hidden throughout the universe. Dark matter makes up a vast majority of gravity-exerting mass in the universe, while only about 10 percent is matter we can see and touch. If dark matter didn't exist, scientists say, galaxies like the Milky Way would have already flown apart from a severe lack of gravitational "glue." Researchers pointed the aging but powerful Hubble Space Telescope toward a cluster of galaxies known as cluster...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - NASA unveiled Thursday a model of the massive space telescope that will replace the aging Hubble in 2013 and allow scientists to observe the formation of the first galaxies at the dawning of the universe. The US National Aeronautics and Space Agency displayed in Washington a full-scale model of the James Webb (news, bio, voting record) Space Telescope, which scientists hope will peer back to the first stars after the "Big Bang" and the formation of solar systems capable of hosting life. JWST, a joint project of the US, European and Canadian space agencies, will be three...

BALTIMORE - The astronauts who will service the Hubble Space Telescope were greeted enthusiastically Wednesday by astronomers who had faced the loss of the orbiting observatory when NASA canceled their mission. The seven astronauts will be "doing as much as we can cram in" to the September 2008 servicing mission that will keep the Hubble alive, mission commander Scott Altman told a crowded auditorium at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which coordinates the use of the telescope. "We will do our absolute best to leave the telescope in the most phenomenal condition that it can be when we let go...

The Sombrero Galaxy appears to hover in space like a glowing UFO in a new composite image made from three of NASA's Great Observatories. Data from a trio of space telescopes – Chandra, Spitzer and Hubble – have been combined to produce the new image. Chandra observations reveal hot gas that glows in X rays and extends about 60,000 light years from the centre of the galaxy, which itself is only 50,000 light years wide. The gas is probably being blown outwards by a wind driven by supernova explosions in the galaxy.

The space shuttle fleet will be retired about two years after Atlantis delivers the last scheduled Hubble repair crew in September 2008... Left to its own devices, the telescope's natural orbital decay will bring it back into the atmosphere sometime between 2022 and 2028, provided the upcoming servicing mission is a success. To keep its reentry from happening over a populated area, the crew of STS-125 will attach the passive half of the Low-Impact Docking System (LIDS) that NASA has baselined for the Orion crew exploration vehicle and other human spacecraft under development for the post-shuttle era. Plans call for...

Today marks the 17th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's "birth" in space, and in a reversal of the usual routine, it's traditional for the Hubble team to give a gift. This time, astronomers are offering a wide-angle panorama of the Carina Nebula - a blazing-hot cosmic cookery that may be much like the environment that gave rise to our own solar system. "It's one of the biggest and brightest star-forming regions in the sky," Nathan Smith, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley, told me Monday. "But this is the first time we've taken a large-scale view...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A dazzlingly detailed image released by NASA scientists on Tuesday shows the chaotic conditions in which stars are born and die -- in this case in a huge nebula in another neighborhood of our Milky Way galaxy. The image, made from a series of 48 shots taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in spring and summer of 2005, depicts star birth in a new level of detail. It provides a view spanning a distance of 50 light years across of the Carina Nebula. A nebula is an immense cloud of hot interstellar gas and dust. This...

Science Daily — The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has delivered an unrivalled snapshot of the nearby barred spiral galaxy NGC 1672. This remarkable image provides a high definition view of the galaxy’s large bar, its fields of star-forming clouds and dark bands of interstellar dust.

NASA has decided to make one final — and controversial — repair call to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), which is slowly dying after more than 16 years in orbit. The telescope was last serviced in 2002. Since then, technical problems have mounted, and a short circuit in January claimed one of its main instruments. Scheduled for a 2008 liftoff aboard Atlantis, the HST-bound crew have their work cut out for them. During five spacewalks the astronauts will perform an array of repairs and installations, adding a new camera and fixing a half-dozen gyroscopes. If the mission succeeds, Hubble should...

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured the largest data set yet of Jupiter's colorful lights called aurora, yielding a pretty picture that could help solve some mysteries about the phenomenon. The phenomenon is similar to the Northern Lights seen on Earth, thought on a much larger scale. "Jupiter has auroras bigger than our entire planet," said Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. In a NASA statement today, Gladstone called the purple rings in a new colorized image "Northern Lights on steroids. They're hundreds of times more energetic than auroras on Earth." Unlike Earth's auroras, Jupiter's...

IMAGINE changing a car battery wearing thick gloves in zero gravity.That will be the challenge facing a servicing mission to the Hubble telescope in September next year. In the meantime the telescope is still exploring the stars, despite recent software damage to the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), which NASA shut down temporarily in January. The ACS was Hubble's wide-angle lens. It was also able to record more of the UV light emanating from the universe and some of its bodies.

Bad vision. A major camera on Hubble has been lost.Credit: NASA / ESA The main camera aboard NASA's orbiting Hubble Space Telescope has conked out, and its loss could delay or cancel much of the work currently proposed for the aging scope. Hubble will continue to peer into the heavens with its three other instruments, however. On 27 January, Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) switched itself into a protective "safe mode" after a short in its electronics. NASA engineers believe the fault has killed the camera's ability to see deep and wide. "It's really a blow to Hubble...

The planet, designated HD 209458b, is unlike any world in our solar system. It orbits so close to its star and gets so hot that its gas is streaming into space, making the planet appear to have a comet-like tail... The Hubble data show how intense ultraviolet radiation from the host star heats the gas in the upper atmosphere, inflating the atmosphere like a balloon. The gas is so hot that it moves very fast and escapes the planet's gravitational pull at a rate of 10,000 tons a second, more than three times the rate of water flowing over Niagara...

NASA does not believe it can restore the Hubble Space Telescope’s main camera to full operation following an electrical failure on 27 January, but it is not planning any changes to the Space Shuttle servicing mission already scheduled for September 2008. The Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), used for about 70% of the telescope’s observations, stopped functioning when the power feed to its electronics package failed, NASA believes. The ACS had been operating on its backup power distribution system since an electrical failure in June last year.

Astronomers have found a black hole where few thought they could ever exist, inside a globular star cluster. The finding has broad implications for the dynamics of stars clusters and also for the existence of a still-speculative new class of black holes called 'intermediate-mass' black holes. The discovery is reported in the current issue of Nature. Tom Maccarone of the University of Southampton in England leads an international team on the finding, made primarily with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite. Globular clusters are dense bundles of thousands to millions of old stars, and many scientists have doubted that black...

For example, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is a NASA satellite that uses microwave radiation to measure the temperature of heat from the Big Bang explosion, the theory of the universe's origin. Microwaves range from 30 centimeters (where one centimeter equals one hundredth of a meter) to about one millimeter in wavelength. In 2003, NASA announced that WMAP had photographed the early universe with first-generation stars that had formed only 200 million years after the Big Bang. WMAP also pinpointed the age of the universe at about 13.7 billion years old. The Spitzer Space Telescope (SST) is an infrared...

NEW YORK - The Hubble Space Telescope has shown that a mysterious form of energy first conceived by Albert Einstein, then rejected by the famous physicist as his "greatest blunder," appears to have been fueling the expansion of the universe for most of its history. This so-called "dark energy" has been pushing the universe outward for at least 9 billion years, astronomers said Thursday. "This is the first time we have significant, discrete data from back then," said Adam Riess, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and researcher at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute. He and several colleagues...

Shuttle astronauts will make one final house call to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope as part of a mission to extend and improve the observatory's capabilities through 2013. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced plans for a fifth servicing mission to Hubble Tuesday during a meeting with agency employees at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Goddard is the agency center responsible for managing Hubble. "We have conducted a detailed analysis of the performance and procedures necessary to carry out a successful Hubble repair mission over the course of the last three shuttle missions. What we have learned has convinced us...

My wife and I have a running joke about how many times the Hubble has been "rescued" and that there always seems to be an 11th hour mercy mission to repair this "camera". We call the Hubble the 'spy sattellite with the laser weapon'. Do you think we will one day read that the Hubble was an invaluable tool for gathering intelligence on our enemies and allies?

Canadian astronomers are applauding NASA plans to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. The American space agency said today a shuttle crew will be sent in early 2008 to fix and upgrade the 16-year-old telescope, overturning a previous decision made after the 2003 Columbia disaster that killed seven. “This is really fabulous news,” said Raymond Carlberg in the department of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto. The Hubble has a long list of scientific accomplishments including offering direct observation of the universe as it was 12 billion years ago, discovering black holes at the centre of galaxies and collecting...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. —  NASA Administrator Michael Griffin on Tuesday approved sending a space shuttle to repair the 16-year-old Hubble Space Telescope, reversing his predecessor's contentious decision to nix the mission. Griffin's announcement was greeted eagerly by astronomers who feared Hubble would deteriorate before the end of the decade without a mission to add new camera instruments, sensors and replace aging batteries. The shuttle mission will likely be in early 2008.

WASHINGTON - Signs are promising for a repair of the aging but popular Hubble Space Telescope, once thought doomed because of worries over astronaut safety. NASA set plans for a big announcement Tuesday after top officials met for three hours Friday to consider the value and risks of sending astronauts to repair the Hubble, extending its life for several more years. The decision rests with NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who hasn't yet made up his mind, NASA spokesman Dean Acosta said Friday in an e-mail. However, the space agency sent out a press release about a gala announcement ceremony for...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A seemingly violent collision of two galaxies is in fact a fertile marriage that has birthed billions of new stars, and an image released on Tuesday gives astronomers their best view yet. The new image of the Antennae galaxies allows astronomers working with the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope to distinguish between new stars and the star clusters that form them. Most of these clusters, created in the collision of the two galaxies, will disperse within 10 million years but about 100 of the largest will grow into "globular clusters" -- large groups of stars found in many...

This is an artist's concept of a Jupiter-mass planet orbiting the nearby star Epsilon Eridani. Located 10.5 light-years away, it is the closest known exoplanet to our Solar System. The planet is in an elliptical orbit that carries it as close to the star as Earth is from the Sun, and as far from the star as Jupiter is from the Sun. Epsilon Eridani is a young star, only 800 million years old. It is still surrounded by a disk of dust that extends 30 billion kilometers from the star. The disk appears as a linear sheet of reflecting dust...

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have confirmed the extrasolar planet status of two of the 16 candidates discovered by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. One of the two confirmed exoplanets has a mass a little below 10 Jupiter masses, while the other is less than 3.8 Jupiter masses... Hubble monitored 180,000 stars for periodic, brief dimming in a star's brightness... Two of the stars in the field are bright enough that the SWEEPS team could make an independent confirmation of a planet's presence by spectroscopically measuring a slight wobble in the star's motion due to the gravitational pull of...

MOSCOW. Oct 3 (Interfax-AVN) - Russia will orbit its Radioastron telescope by the end of 2008, said Nikolai Kardashev, head of the Russian Physics Institute's Astro-Space Center. "It is expected that the astrophysical observatory Radioastron will be orbited in late 2007. A slight delay is possible. I think that in any case this will not happen later than 2008," Kardashev told a news conference on Tuesday. The total cost in creating the telescope is about 3 billion rubles, he said.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed one of the smallest objects ever seen around a normal star beyond our Sun. Weighing in at 12 times the mass of Jupiter, the object is small enough to be a planet. The conundrum is that it's also large enough to be a brown dwarf, a failed star.

Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. The discovery, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, gives direct evidence for the existence of dark matter. "This is the most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, which we know about," said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. These observations provide the strongest evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is dark. Despite considerable evidence for dark matter, some scientists have proposed alternative theories for gravity where it...

Thus, over a period of five years -- 1989 to 1994 -- the two major space agencies had rejected a total of four major proposals for large radiatively cooled telescopes operating at infrared/sub-millimeter wavelengths. Nonetheless, the paradigm had shifted. For the first time large infrared telescopes seemed possible and the L2 Lagrangian point became the preferred location for missions of all kinds. Although proposals for a large-aperture radiatively-cooled infrared telescope would never win either an ESA or a NASA competition, "conventional wisdom" had moved on from cryogenic cooling. In 1996, the Dressler Committee’s "HST & Beyond" identified Edison and High-Z...

Space ImagingHubble Can See AgainDanit Lidor 06.30.06, 5:20 PM ET The Hubble telescope has been transmitting awe-inspiring images and priceless information about the universe to Earth-bound humans for sixteen years. But the observatory is starting to show its age.Then last week, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced that the school-bus sized telescope’s most sophisticated imaging instrument had shut down. Friday NASA successfully switched the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to a secondary power channel after concluding that a transistor in the camera’s power supply had failed. Allowing for recalibration, the ACS should return to its scientific observations...

BALTIMORE -- The main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, which has revolutionized astronomy with its stunning pictures of the universe, has stopped working, engineers who work on the camera said Saturday. The Advanced Camera for Surveys, a third-generation instrument installed by a space shuttle crew in 2002, went off line Monday, and engineers are still trying to figure out what happened and how to repair it. "It's still off line today," Max Mutchler, an instruments specialist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said Saturday. Engineers are hopeful the problem can be fixed, said Ed Campion, a NASA...

The primary instrument aboard the Hubble Space Telescope shut down this week, an unwelcome reminder that the observatory's future is tightly tied to NASA's upcoming space shuttle launch... Project managers expect the telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys to be out of commission at least through the end of the month, but have high hopes it eventually will be recovered... If engineers' initial troubleshooting efforts are correct, the problem should be resolved by switching to a backup electronics unit. A circuit on the primary unit is believed to have failed. The backup unit was extensively tested before Hubble was put into...

Scientists use quantum gravity to describe the universe before the Big Bang.Scientists may finally have an answer to a "big" question: If the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, what could have caused it to happen? Using a theory called "loop quantum gravity," a group led by Penn State professor Abhay Ashtekar has shown that just before the Big Bang occurred, another universe very similar to ours may have been contracting. According to the group's findings, this previous universe eventually became so dense that a normally negligible repulsive component of the gravitational force overpowered the attractive component, causing...

The latest available Shuttle mission manifest continues to evolve ahead of an exciting finale for the three NASA orbiters, with the highlight mission of servicing the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) moving up to flight 10 of a 17 mission schedule. HST-SM04 - STS-125 - has now moved from Endeavour to Discovery, with a new NET (No Earlier Than) launch date of April 11, 2008, moving ahead of STS-119 – ISS Assembly flight 15A - from the previous manifest.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is giving astronomers their most detailed view yet of a second red spot emerging on Jupiter. For the first time in history, astronomers have witnessed the birth of a new red spot on the giant planet, which is located half a billion miles away. The storm is roughly one-half the diameter of its bigger and legendary cousin, the Great Red Spot. Researchers suggest that the new spot may be related to a possible major climate change in Jupiter's atmosphere. These images were taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys on April 8 and 16, 2006

Comet break-up pictured by Hubble The image shows the break-up of one fragment into smaller pieces The break-up of a comet has been shown in extraordinary detail by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. The images reveal the comet has crumbled into over three dozen fragments; many more than had been shown from ground-based observations. Astronomers say the Hubble images will provide an unprecedented opportunity to study a comet's demise. The disintegrating comet will pass Earth on 6 May at a distance of 11.7 million km (7.3 million miles). Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, discovered in 1930 by German astronomers, orbits the Sun...