The Hubble Space Telescope
Organization - NASA / ESA / STScI
Launch date - April 24, 1990, 8:33:51 am EDT
Launch vehicle - Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-31)
Mission length - 21 years, 4 months and 26 days elapsed
De orbited due - 2013–2021
Mass - 11,110 kg (24,500 lb)
Type of orbit - Near-circular low Earth orbit
Orbit height - 559 km (347 mi)
Orbit period - 96–97 minutes (14-15 periods per day)
Orbit velocity - 7,500 m/s (25,000 ft/s)
Acceleration due to gravity - 8.169 m/s2 (26.80 ft/s2)
Location - Low Earth orbit
Telescope style - Ritchey-Chrétien reflector
Wavelength - visible light, ultraviolet, near-infrared
Diameter - 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in)
Collecting area - 4.5 m2 (48 sq ft)
Focal length - 57.6 m (189 ft)
The most impressive attribute 'Hubble' has is how far out to space it can see. There are a few facts you must see before you can truly understand the Hubble's Massive potential.
First of all the universe is so big that when talking about distances in space it is refereed to as lightyears, one lightyear is just under 6 trillion miles, this is calculated by the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year. If you then 9 more zeros on the end of the 6 trillion miles you get 1 billion light years, and the Hubble space telescope has the ability to see objects roughly 10-15 billion light years away.
Something i find very interesting myself is that if these objects, weather they are stars, planets or galaxies are billions of years away that means by the time the light reaches the earth and the Hubble space telescope we are in fact seeing the past. Anything this far into space is known as the 'Hubble Deep Field'.
Hubble Deep Field
The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, constructed from a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area 2.5 arcminutes across, two parts in a million of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a 65 mm tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres. The image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995.
Something i find very interesting myself is that if these objects, weather they are stars, planets or galaxies are billions of years away that means by the time the light reaches the earth and the Hubble space telescope we are in fact seeing the past. Anything this far into space is known as the 'Hubble Deep Field'.
Hubble Deep Field
The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, constructed from a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area 2.5 arcminutes across, two parts in a million of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a 65 mm tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres. The image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995.
The field is so small that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie within it; thus, almost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some of which are among the youngest and most distant known. By revealing such large numbers of very young galaxies, the HDF has become a landmark image in the study of the early universe, with the associated scientific paper having received over 800 citations by the end of 2008.
Here is a video explaining the HDF, Hubble Deep Field process.
No comments:
Post a Comment