This short video shows the excitement of working in the Hubble Control Room during a spacewalk.
Heidi Hammel, a Senior Research Scientist from the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, expresses her views on the past, present, and future of the Hubble Space Telescope and its upcoming repair mission.
Shortly after NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced that NASA would add a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, Hubble’s most prominent camera and most used instrument, died. Goddard Engineers leveraged techniques they developed for STIS repair to fix ACS.
STIS was our first black hole hunter. It confirmed for the first time the existence of a super massive black hole in the center of a galaxy. And it went on to make the first detection and chemical analysis of the atmosphere of a planet around another star. We want to want to keep on doing that kind of work.
Spectroscopes or spectrographs are absolutely essential in that toolbox of astronomical tools that are so important for research. They produce ugly pictures. But they are the nuts and bolts of physical science. They put the physics in astrophysics.
Hubble laid the groundwork that you can do things in space with a telescope that wasn’t planned to do that observation. We have pushed the instruments to a level that wasn’t expected, even by the people who build the instrument.
The Wide Field Camera is going to be very useful for those who are studying the Kuiper Belt cause it will allow them to see more objects over a wider field.
Michael Strauss, Chair of one of the panels reviewing and judging the Hubble Space Telescope proposals: "Our job is to choose the best science projects and the new scientific opportunities with the COS and the WFC3, the two new instruments that are being put on to Hubble."
This is going to be a very exciting, complicated and challenging mission. We have seven brave astronauts who’ve made a conscious decision to risk their lives in order to continue the advancement of science that Hubble has begun. They’re going to buy another five, perhaps ten more years of lifetime for this great telescope.
The last mission to Hubble, Servicing Mission 4 movie-trailer-like video.