Hubble Space Telescope

Nearly two years after accepting technical explanations for flaws in the Hubble Space Telescope, the federal government is investigating whether the manufacturer withheld critical information that might have prevented costly and embarrassing failures. A NASA investigating board found in November, 1990, that the manufacturer of Hubble's lenses, Perkin-Elmer Corp.'s former optics division, ignored three test failures and did not consult its own experts in building the defective $1.

Walk through the halls of UC Irvine's astronomy wing after dinner on a weeknight and you will find roomfuls of young graduate students, crammed into small desks, solving equations, writing computer code and developing innovative ways to analyze data. They do not have to be here. These are people with career options. They are scary-smart, creative and hardworking. Yet they have come here from all over the country and the world to sit in windowless offices and make a fifth of the money they could make back home or up the street.

The Hubble Space Telescope, which has produced images from the distant reaches of the universe since its early "vision" problems were corrected in 1993, is getting an even stronger pair of glasses. Later this month, the space shuttle Columbia will carry astronauts to upgrade the orbiting telescope, NASA said. One main piece of equipment will be the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which scientists say will have 10 times the power of the camera it will replace.

Astronomer Allan R. Sandage of Pasadena's Carnegie Observatories, one of the most prominent cosmologists of the 20th century who spent the better part of his lifetime trying to determine the precise age of the universe, died Saturday at his home in San Gabriel. He was 84 and had been suffering from pancreatic cancer. Beginning in the early 1950s, when he served as the illustrious Edwin Hubble's observing assistant at the Mt. Wilson and Palomar observatories, Sandage single-mindedly sought the elusive Hubble constant, named after his mentor.

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a mosaic of photos that includes more than 40,000 galaxies in a patch of sky about the size of the full moon. The study, combining 78 separate exposures by the Hubble, gives astronomers a wide sampling of many galaxies that could be used to study how the massive groupings of stars originate, change shape and move together in clusters. Eric F.

Technicians on Thursday loaded the $1.5-billion Hubble Space Telescope aboard the shuttle Discovery in a major step toward putting the most expensive civilian satellite ever built into orbit in two weeks. The delicate six-hour procedure began two days late because of work to capture or kill dozens of tiny "midges"--small flies that look like tiny mosquitoes--that infiltrated the telescope's ultra-clean launching pad storage room earlier this week.

Astronomers for the first time have observed the atmosphere of a planet circling a distant star, opening the possibility of more comprehensive searches for the chemical markers of life on distant planets. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, a team headed by David Charbonneau of Caltech and Timothy Brown of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., were able to study the atmosphere of a planet circling a star about 150 light-years away.

Images from the Hubble Space Telescope have provided astronomers with their first views of the galaxies that host quasars, intensely bright quasi-stellar objects thought to be powered by a black hole at their centers. Quasars are so bright that their light has overpowered the images of galaxies in previous photos. The pictures reveal that quasars are found in a broad variety of galaxies, including stable spiral galaxies and galaxies in collision.

Taking advantage of Mars' closest approach to Earth in eight years, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken remarkable new pictures of the red planet. The above image is centered near the Pathfinder landing site. Dark sand dunes that surround the polar ice cap merge into a large, dark region called Acidalia. Below and to the left of Acidalia are the massive canyon systems of Valles Marineris.

The Hubble Space Telescope, launched Tuesday aboard the space shuttle Discovery, is far more than a single telescope. It is five, some say six, telescopes wrapped into one. The telescope has five primary instruments, each the size of a telephone booth, designed to study the universe in different ways. In addition, the telescope's guidance system is so precise it will keep the Hubble fixed on distant pinpoints of light while zipping around the Earth at 25,000 m.p.h.

In space, no one can hear you scream -- and you can't reload film into a large-format camera. Given that limitation, when the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis blasted off 10 months ago to rendezvous with the Hubble Space Telescope for repairs, they had to be conscientious about using the 700-pound Imax 3-D strapped into the cargo bay to film their mission. Even though housing a mile's length of film, the camera could shoot only about 8 1/2 minutes of footage before running out, so every moment captured on film had to be planned out and timed to the second.

The spectacular new Imax film "Hubble 3D" will be studied by astronomers, academics and Hollywood special effects artists for years to come. It's a movie that not only puts you in space but lets you travel through it with a speed and wonder that would make James T. Kirk go a little weak in the knees. The 43-minute documentary follows the crew of the space shuttle Atlantis on their May 2009 mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. A 700-pound Imax 3-D camera accompanied them, anchored in the cargo bay, loaded with a mile of film.

Retired Air Force Gen. Lew Allen Jr., who during his multifaceted career headed the National Security Agency, was Air Force chief of staff and shepherded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory through a crucial period when budgets were at an all-time low and new space missions didn't seem imminent, has died. He was 84. Allen died Monday in Potomac Falls, Va., his family announced. No cause was given. Allen led the laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge during a period that saw the launches of the Galileo mission to Jupiter, Magellan to Venus, the Voyager 2 flybys of Uranus and Neptune and the Infrared Astronomical Satellite to Earth orbit.

Wendy Freedman, director of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, and two colleagues were named this month as recipients of the $500,000 Gruber Prize, one of the world's top awards in the field of cosmology. Freedman, along with Robert Kennicutt and Jeremy Mould, were honored for their nearly decade-long effort to find a more precise value for the Hubble constant, one of the key values in cosmology, a measure of how fast the universe is expanding and thus how old it is. The Freedman team's work helped scientists to arrive at the currently accepted age of the universe: 13.7 billion years.

The space shuttle Atlantis and its crew of seven returned to Earth on Sunday at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, announcing its approach with twin sonic booms. Atlantis circled Earth 197 times and traveled 5.3 million miles before ending its daring 13-day mission to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope. The shuttle, which landed at 8:39 a.m., had been diverted to California after nasty weather prevented a landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

President Obama will name former astronaut Charles F. Bolden Jr. as NASA administrator, according to three congressional sources. If confirmed by the Senate, the retired Marine Corps general would be the first African American to head the agency. The timing, the sources said, is keyed to the landing of the shuttle Atlantis, which remained in orbit Friday because of bad weather but will return today or Sunday.

The American public was aghast when the price tag for curing the nearsightedness of the often-maligned Hubble Space Telescope was floated in the early '90s. Among other things, the rescue mission was billed as "the $629-million house call." In those days, the Hubble, with its flawed hardware, was deemed just another billion-dollar space boondoggle, destined to go down in history with the Mars Observer probe as a symbol of everything that was wrong with NASA and America's space program.

Astronomical theorists are eating their humble pie this week after learning that some of their pet theories about the most brilliant objects in the universe are probably dead wrong. Widely accepted theory holds that quasars--those distant star-like objects that shine more brightly than a thousand galaxies--are really super-massive black holes devouring nearby stars.

A rejuvenated Hubble Space Telescope, more powerful than ever, departed the space shuttle Tuesday and sailed off for new discoveries. "It's showtime for us now," program scientist Eric Smith said. Hubble -- considered to be at its prime after five days of repairs and upgrades -- was gently dropped overboard by the shuttle Atlantis astronauts, the last humans to see the 19-year-old observatory up close.

Astronauts Michael Massimino and Michael Good were hoping that their tough repair mission Sunday to fix the Hubble telescope's black-hole hunter would go as smoothly as Saturday's spacewalk, which revived a dead space camera on the observatory. No such luck. The two managed to pull off the fix after eight hours and two minutes, but it was one of the most frustrating spacewalks in NASA history, stymied by a stuck bolt and a balky tool.