The 60 minutes story in the week on the Hubble Space Telescope is called “Vast,” and also the numbers certainly justify the title.
For example, the sun that lights our planet each day is actually a yellow dwarf star of modest size, relative to the other one hundred billion stars in our galaxy, the milky way.
Our galaxy itself is dwarfed by the calculable 2 trillion galaxies in our universe, bringing the overall number of stars within the night sky to approximately 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
This week on 60 minutes, correspondent Bill Whitaker takes a closer look at the telescope that allows scientists to see into some of the farthest stretches of the universe — and to quantify simply how enormous it’s. because Hubble continually improves our understanding of the cosmos, scientists do not undervalue the telescope’s importance.
“I believe Hubble has been the one most transformative scientific instrument that we’ve ever built,” NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn tells Whitaker.
60 Minutes 1st reported on Hubble fifteen years ago in the week. As correspondent ed Bradley explained within the piece below, its cameras are therefore sophisticated they’ll capture light that began traveling through space billions of years ago. By the time that light finally enters the telescope and is transformed into a picture, the picture it shows is of the universe because it was when the light began its journey within the unimaginably distant past. The telescope is, in essence, a time machine.
Hubble was launched in 1990, but Congress initially approved funding for its construction in 1977. it absolutely was named after Dr. Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer who, back within the 1920s, discovered that the universe is expanding. Currently, his namesake telescope has proven that it’s expanding quicker than scientists will justify.
“It implies that we do not understand gravity,” Dr. ed Weiler told Bradley. At the time, Dr. Weiler was the top of science for {nasa|National Aeronautics and area Administration|NASA|independent agency} and also the person in charge of the Hubble Space Telescope; he later became director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “This implies there is some negative energy force, some anti-gravity that is actually pushing things apart. We do not understand it. it is not supposed to be there.”
Bradley also spoke with Zoltan Levay, a NASA imaging specialist who applies color to Hubble’s black and white pictures to stunning effect. Levay uses scientific data to determine what color the scenes are, billions of sunshine years away and says the images are representations of reality, even as a photograph is.
“We do adjust the color a little bit, partially just so it’s higher, and partly so it also imparts the information that we’d wish to get across,” Levay said.
Soon, Hubble’s spectacular images will not be the only pictures we’ve of the distant universe. The much larger James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to launch next year, and its camera should be ready to detect light from the terribly earliest galaxies, giving us images from the beginning of time.
“The James Webb Space Telescope was specifically designed to see the first stars and galaxies that were formed within the universe,” John Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist at the Goddard space Flight Center, tells Whitaker in the week. “So we’re going to see that snapshot of when stars started. when galaxies started. The very 1st moments of the universe. My bet? there is going to be some massive surprises.”
Grunsfeld is also referred to as the Hubble repairer. As an astronaut, he flew 3 missions to mend Hubble and to upgrade its equipment. Hubble’s replacement, however, will not have that possibility — the James Webb telescope will be too far-off from Earth for astronauts to visit after launch.
Because the new telescope is an infrared telescope, it’ll sense heat, and also the Earth is too hot for it to orbit as closely as Hubble does these days. whereas Hubble hovers three hundred miles higher than Earth, the James Webb telescope will be 1,000,000 miles out. For comparison, the moon orbits the earth at simply 238,900 miles.
“We’re doing 2 grand experiments,” Grunsfeld tells Whitaker within the 60 minutes Overtime clip at the top of the page. “The Hubble Space Telescope, that was designed for extreme servicing, you know, we will fix everything. and also the James Webb area Telescope, wherever we can fix nothing. it’s to work the first time. And it is a terribly complicated telescope.”
But Matt Mountain, the telescope scientist for the Webb telescope says NASA has it figured out. If scientists cannot physically fix the instrument in space, they will have to rely on their ability to tweak it from the ground.
“The whole plan here is, when we send it out this unbelievable distance wherever we will not go out and fix it, we’ve more knobs we will twiddle on the ground that we ne’er had with Hubble,” Mountain tell Whitaker within the clip above.
Still, with a price tag of $8 billion dollars, Mountain acknowledges that sending the Webb telescope into unreachable space with success is a massive gamble.
“So when you do hard things, sometimes you’ve got to take risks, right?” Mountain says. “This could be a uniquely powerful telescope, the foremost powerful space telescope humanity’s ever launched… within the end though, you are absolutely right. It’s got to work by the time we get out there.”
