NASA's Hubble Space Telescope
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V O L 2 2 I S S U E 0 3 Space Telescope Science Institute Getting so Much The caption for this figure is located on page 3. Better all the Time Figure 1: B. Margon, [email protected] here is, alas, no special nomenclature for a 15th anniversary. value to the public. The program has been responsible for a large number It is five years short of the vigenary date, or perhaps can be of famous, widely circulated Hubble images. Even with this past high expressed as the sum of the decennial and quinquennial years. standard, the Heritage team, led by Keith Noll, outdid themselves for But for Hubble Space Telescope, the passage of April 25, 2005, this special occasion with two new multicolor images surely destined to exactly 15 years after the deployment of the satellite from the become iconic: a wide-field exposure of M51 (the Whirlpool Galaxy) with TShuttle Discovery, could not be allowed to pass unnoted for lack of a its companion NGC 5195, and a large section of M16 (the Eagle Nebula), name. It is unusual for any high-technology scientific experiment to remain centered about 10 arcminutes away from the already famous image from productive and in the forefront of both the discipline and the public for such the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). The huge number of 2 0 0 5 an extended time interval, and certainly extraordinary for its productivity pixels and wide field of view of ACS, compared with its predecessor Hubble and fame to continually increase with age for such a lengthy time. Yet by cameras, enabled breathtaking results for both images. most metrics, this is indeed the case for Hubble. Therefore, a variety of Thanks to frantic work by John Stoke and colleagues in the Institute’s celebrations and commemorative activities seemed more than justified Office of Public Outreach, the two new Heritage images were released to this spring. Multiple events and opportunities occurred for the public, for the public in a particularly dramatic form, namely as 4 × 6 foot prints— the astronomical community, and for the Hubble family. predistributed, but embargoed against display until the anniversary day— A centerpiece of the celebration was the release of two new images to more than 100 museums, planetariums, and related informal science obtained by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) under the aegis of education venues across the nation, plus a few abroad. A variety of ancillary the Hubble Heritage program. Heritage images utilize a small, annually explanatory materials (lithographs, PowerPoint files, reviewed grant of the Institute Director’s Discretionary time to obtain DVDs) accompanied the giant, hundred-million-pixel Continued page 3 S U M M E R exposures of targets deemed to be of the greatest interest and educative prints. The recipient institutions ranged from the DIRECTOR’S PERSPECTIVE Hubble’s Future S. Beckwith, [email protected] n April 2005, Hubble received a new lease on life at the Senate confirmation hearing for Michael Griffin as the NASA Administrator. In response to a question by Senator Pryor, Griffin spoke eloquently on Hubble’s contribution to science and indicated his interest in re-examining the question of servicing Hubble following the return to flight of the space shuttle. In testimony to the House Science Committee on June 28, he stated his intention to recommend another servicing mission to Hubble, if the first two space shuttle flights meet their technical goals. He has already directed the Hubble project team at Goddard to start Hubble has also played an important role in building public support for preparing for the next servicing mission, SM4, assuming use of a space astronomy. It is certainly the world’s most recognized telescope and is shuttle, as in the past. NASA has internally identified December 2007 as perhaps the world’s most recognized scientific instrument. Following a a launch date for planning purposes. successful servicing mission, the continuing stream of interesting science Griffin has promised that the Science Missions Directorate will not pay from Hubble should make it easier to maintain support for additional public for the shuttle costs, as some feared; those will come from the same investment in astronomical research—a cause that all readers of this budget line that normally funds the space shuttle program. Newsletter will surely support. We will need that support to weather the A new feature of SM4 is NASA’s requirement that the mission include inevitable crises that will occur as new projects could run into technical the installation of a de-orbit module for the end of Hubble’s life. This and financial difficulty. requirement is a prudent use of NASA’s resources, because it obviates In the seven years I have been associated with the Hubble program, I the need for a separate robotic mission in the future, which would be at have become increasingly aware of the emotional appeal it has to people great cost to the Science Missions Directorate. NASA policy states that whose daily lives are otherwise disconnected from questions about the Hubble must be safely de-orbited at the end of its mission; this requires universe. I have met people from all walks of life who have been touched the assistance of a propulsion system to guide its re-entry into the by the work astronomers do. Making the most of Hubble’s science atmosphere. NASA had planned to develop a robotic mission that would opportunities should help maintain their support for the foreseeable autonomously mount the propulsion system. Equipping Hubble with a de- future. W orbit module during SM4 has the potential to save hundreds of millions of dollars that would have been spent on a robotic mission. A successful SM4 will bring several additional benefits beyond the savings to the science budget. The longer life for Hubble’s science program and the enhanced quality and scope enabled by the new instruments will benefit Hubble’s users. The extra years of science will be popular with the public, whose support for servicing has been unwavering since the cancellation of SM4 on January 16, 2004. Servicing Hubble will also be a wonderful way to show the utility of the space shuttle following its return to flight, a benefit to the human spaceflight program. 2 world famous (e.g., the Rose Center, Museum of Natural History in New York and the Exploratorium in San Francisco), to the perhaps not so famous (the Hitchcock Nature Center of Pottawattamie County, Honeycutt, Iowa), to the heartwarming (U.S. Navy youth centers in Guam and Iceland). My personal favorite case is the print circulating in rural Alaska by dogsled, under the sponsorship of the Alaskan Express Freight Sled Expedition, formerly known as the Iditarod. Figure 2: The Hubble Heritage Image of M51 (the Whirlpool Nebula) and its interacting companion NGC 5195. This is a montage of six pointings obtained with the Hubble ACS, superposing data from B, V, I, and Ha filters. In a somewhat more traditional unveiling, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM) on the Mall in Washington DC accepted the large Heritage Whirlpool image for permanent display in an April 25th ceremony attended by more than 100 government, scientific, and industry leaders, including the new NASA Administrator, Dr. Michael Griffin. The event included a brief new IMAX film, produced collaboratively by the Institute’s Office of Public Outreach and the IMAX Corporation. The film pans slowly through the two ACS images. The 60-foot screen and the hundred-million-pixel scenes seemed well matched! A variety of other new Hubble images joined the NASM collection as part of this ceremony. The large ACS Whirlpool image, dramatically backlit, now graces the entrance to the permanent “Explore the Universe” astronomy exhibit, which, fittingly enough, has long employed small, ground-based images of M51 as the repeating icon for that collection. The 24 orbits of observing time invested in the M51 images, although less than 1% of the time available to General Observers (GOs) in Cycle 13, was still substantial by Heritage standards. Figure 1: (Cover Image) Therefore, the Institute was anxious that the data serve double duty—by having its value for the scientific community optimized to every extent possible. Certainly it is not every day that an entire A 3 arcmin wide section of the Eagle nearby face-on spiral is imaged on 0.05 arcsec pixels to limiting B magnitude of 27! Rob Kennicutt Nebula, M16, obtained with the Hubble of Steward Observatory kindly served as a “science advocate” during the time the observations ACS. This Heritage image is a montage were configured, and the Institute announced the upcoming public release of the data (also on the of two pointings, superposing data from anniversary date), together with the details of the observation, well prior to the Cycle 14 proposal B, V, I, [O III], and Ha filters. The field deadline. The community was invited to propose Archival Research programs to analyze these of the other, very famous image of this unique data for publication, and provided the opportunity for normal GO object from WFPC2 is about 10 arcmin proposals to supplement the Heritage data with additional exposures, as distant and thus does not overlap these Continued well. (No special Hubble time was allocated; these proposals competed in page 4 new data. the normal Cycle 14 peer review process with all other programs.) 3 This research component of the anniversary program succeeded well beyond our expectations. 15th Anniversary from page 3 Nineteen proposals to utilize the M51 Heritage data for scientific analysis were received in Cycle 14, and the peer review process selected five of them, four archival, and one for acquisition of new data.