1. Hubble Telescope

Category Archives: Hubble Telescope

Wow! This Hubble Telescope Photo of Mars with a Comet Is Amazing

Posted on by

The famed Hubble Space Telscope has captured a jaw-dropping view of a comet making an incredibly close flyby of Mars.

The space telescope snapped the amazing image when Comet Siding Spring (also called C/2013 A1) was hurtling through space near the Red Planet on Oct. 18 and Oct. 19. During its closest approach on Oct. 19, the comet passed about 86,000 miles (138,000 kilometers) from Mars just one-third of the distance between Earth and the moon.

Mars and the comet shine in Hubble's new image. The planet glows red, and Comet Siding Spring's bright nucleus and diffuse tail stand out against a host of background stars glimmering behind the two cosmic bodies. The photo was created by combining separate images of the comet and Mars taken over the weekend. [See more amazing Comet Siding Spring images]

"The Mars and comet images have been added together to create a single picture to illustrate the angular separation, or distance, between the comet and Mars at closest approach," NASA officials said in a statement.

"The background starfield in this composite image is synthesized from ground-based telescope data provided by the Palomar Digital Sky Survey, which has been reprocessed to approximate Hubbles resolution," space agency officials added. "The solid icy comet nucleus is too small to be resolved in the Hubble picture. The comets bright coma, a diffuse cloud of dust enshrouding the nucleus, and a dusty tail, are clearly visible."

Hubble officials couldn't capture both the comet and Mars in the same frame properly because the planet is about 10,000 times brighter than Siding Spring, according to NASA. The two cosmic bodies are also moving, and Hubble could only properly track one at a time.

If the space telescope took an image of both at the same time, at least one of the celestial targets would have been blurry, NASA officials added.

Other NASA spacecraft also caught sight of the historic flyby. The space agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Opportunity rover both captured images of the comet passing by Mars. NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) and Odyssey probes were also expected to observe the comet's close pass. The space agency's Curiosity rover was also in position to study the comet.

India's Mangalyaan orbiter circling Mars and Europe's Mars Express spacecraft were also expected to observe Siding Spring's flyby.

Follow Miriam Kramer @mirikramer and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookand Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Continue reading here:

Wow! This Hubble Telescope Photo of Mars with a Comet Is Amazing

NASAs Hubble Telescope Finds Kuiper Belt object (KBO) Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission – Video

Posted on by


NASAs Hubble Telescope Finds Kuiper Belt object (KBO) Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission
NASA #39;s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered three Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) the agency #39;s New Horizons spacecraft could potentially visit after it flies by Pluto in July 2015. The KBOs...

By: 3R ENTERTAINMENTS

Go here to see the original:

NASAs Hubble Telescope Finds Kuiper Belt object (KBO) Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission - Video

NASA's Hubble Telescope Finds Potential Kuiper Belt Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission

Posted on by

Contact Information

Available for logged-in reporters only

Newswise Peering out to the dim, outer reaches of our solar system, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered three Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) the agency's New Horizons spacecraft could potentially visit after it flies by Pluto in July 2015.

The KBOs were detected through a dedicated Hubble observing program by a New Horizons search team that was awarded telescope time for this purpose.

"This has been a very challenging search, and it's great that in the end Hubble could accomplish a detection one NASA mission helping another," said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission.

The Kuiper Belt is a vast rim of primordial debris encircling our solar system. KBOs belong to a unique class of solar system objects that has never been visited by spacecraft and which contain clues to the origin of our solar system.

The KBOs that Hubble found are each about 10 times larger than typical comets, but only about 1-2 percent of the size of Pluto. Unlike asteroids, KBOs have not been heated by the Sun and are thought to represent a pristine, well preserved, deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago. The KBOs found in the Hubble data are thought to be the building blocks of dwarf planets such as Pluto.

The New Horizons team started to look for suitable KBOs in 2011 using some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth. They found several dozen KBOs, but none were reachable within the fuel supply available aboard the New Horizons spacecraft.

"We started to get worried that we could not find anything suitable, even with Hubble, but in the end the space telescope came to the rescue," said New Horizons science team member John Spencer of SwRI. There was a huge sigh of relief when we found suitable KBOs; we are 'over the moon' about this detection."

Following an initial proof of concept of the Hubble pilot observing program in June, the New Horizons team was awarded telescope time by the Space Telescope Science Institute for a wider survey in July. When the search was completed in early September, the team identified one KBO that is "definitely reachable" and two other potentially accessible KBOs that will require more tracking over several months to know whether they too are accessible by the New Horizons spacecraft.

Originally posted here:

NASA's Hubble Telescope Finds Potential Kuiper Belt Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission

Hubble Telescope Finds Potential Kuiper Belt Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission

Posted on by

Peering out to the dim, outer reaches of our solar system, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered three Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) the agency's New Horizons spacecraft could potentially visit after it flies by Pluto in July 2015.

The KBOs were detected through a dedicated Hubble observing program by a New Horizons search team that was awarded telescope time for this purpose.

"This has been a very challenging search and it's great that in the end Hubble could accomplish a detection - one NASA mission helping another," said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission.

The Kuiper Belt is a vast rim of primordial debris encircling our solar system. KBOs belong to a unique class of solar system objects that has never been visited by spacecraft and which contain clues to the origin of our solar system.

The KBOs Hubble found are each about 10 times larger than typical comets, but only about 1-2 percent of the size of Pluto. Unlike asteroids, KBOs have not been heated by the sun and are thought to represent a pristine, well preserved deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago. The KBOs found in the Hubble data are thought to be the building blocks of dwarf planets such as Pluto.

The New Horizons team started to look for suitable KBOs in 2011 using some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth. They found several dozen KBOs, but none was reachable within the fuel supply available aboard the New Horizons spacecraft.

"We started to get worried that we could not find anything suitable, even with Hubble, but in the end the space telescope came to the rescue," said New Horizons science team member John Spencer of SwRI. "There was a huge sigh of relief when we found suitable KBOs; we are 'over the moon' about this detection."

Following an initial proof of concept of the Hubble pilot observing program in June, the New Horizons Team was awarded telescope time by the Space Telescope Science Institute for a wider survey in July.

When the search was completed in early September, the team identified one KBO that is considered "definitely reachable," and two other potentially accessible KBOs that will require more tracking over several months to know whether they too are accessible by the New Horizons spacecraft.

This was a needle-in-haystack search for the New Horizons team because the elusive KBOs are extremely small, faint, and difficult to pick out against a myriad background of stars in the constellation Sagittarius, which is in the present direction of Pluto. The three KBOs identified each are a whopping 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. Two of the KBOs are estimated to be as large as 34 miles (55 kilometers) across, and the third is perhaps as small as 15 miles (25 kilometers).

Read the original here:

Hubble Telescope Finds Potential Kuiper Belt Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission

The explosive beauty of a dying star

Posted on by

A beautiful image captured by the Hubble telescope shows in glorious detail the contours of the Butterfly Nebula.

NASA/ESA/Hubble SM4 ERO Team

There's an ancient belief that, just before it dies, the mute swan bursts into beautiful song, going out in a blaze of glory. While stars don't exactly make audible sounds, their death throes can be a spectacular thing.

Take this image of the Butterfly, or Bug, Nebula, NG 6302, located 3,800 light years away in the constellation of Scorpius, originally captured by the Hubble space telescope in 2009. It is a type of nebula called a bipolar nebula, for its shape: two wings that that spread out from a central core -- a dying star.

As a star enters the final stages of its life, finally running out of nuclear fuel, it sheds its outer layers into space, forming a cloud of matter around the star, which becomes very dense, very hot and very bright -- a white dwarf. This lights up the surrounding nebula in all its glory.

The white dwarf at the centre of NG 6302 is one of the hottest stars in the Milky Way galaxy, burning at around 222,000 degrees Celsius (400,000 degrees Fahrenheit), indicating that it was once massive -- five times the mass of our Sun.

This star shed its layers over a period of about 2,200 years, and has a "wingspan" of over three light years. Wrapped around the star, you can see a torus -- a donut-shape -- of dust, obscuring it, and cinching the "waist" of the hourglass. This ring of dust constricts the outward expansion of the nebula, giving it its shape.

The colours and shapes in the nebula's wings reveal its complex history. As it evolved into a red giant, with a diameter 1,000 times that of the Sun, the star started shedding its outer layers. At its equator, matter was ejected at a relatively low speed of around 32,000 kph (20,000 mph), while matter from the stars poles was ejected at a much higher speed; this formed the original dust torus and wings of the nebula.

As the star started to turn into a white dwarf, heating up drastically, the stellar wind blasted particles at a speed of around 3.2 million kph (2 million mph), further altering the shape and composition of the wings.

The red regions in the image indicate the presence of nitrogen, the coolest gas visible in the image. White regions indicate light emitted by sulphur, where the fast-moving gas and particles from later in the star's death cycle overtook and collided with the slower-moving gas, producing shockwaves. Hydrogen is visible in brown, helium in blue and oxygen in cyan and purple.

Here is the original post:

The explosive beauty of a dying star

Male-led teams more likely to get Hubble Telescope time

Posted on by

A new study suggests a there's a gender bias in the approval process for research teams looking to use the Hubble Telescope. Researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization that runs the Hubble Space Telescope program, found that male-led proposals are more likely to be approved and granted time with the telescopes than female-led research projects.

Only a third of applying research teams are granted time on the telescopes, so the odds are stacked against scientists to begin with. But the new study, carried out by STScI researcher Neill Reid found the odds of approval are even less if a woman is the team's principle investigator. Reid said the discrepancy in any given year is small, but worryingly consistent.

"The offsets are small enough that they might be ascribed to chance for any single cycle," Reid wrote, "but the consistent pattern suggests the presence of a systematic effect."

The study is currently publicly available in the early-release online journal arXiv, and it is set to be published in the upcoming issue of the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

"There is growing recognition in the community that unconscious biases can play an important role in all decision making processes, even those related to the 'hard' sciences," Reid wrote in 2013, explaining the motivation for his ongoing research.

The researchers acknowledged it's possible the female-led proposals are simply less compelling than other proposals, but said such a scenario is unlikely, given that almost research proposals are written by a team of males and females. The only relevant variable seems to be the gender of the principle investigator.

Originally posted here:

Male-led teams more likely to get Hubble Telescope time

Research shows gender bias in approval for Hubble Telescope use

Posted on by

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- A new study suggests a there's a gender bias in the approval process for research teams looking to use the Hubble Telescope. Researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization that runs the Hubble Space Telescope program, found that male-led proposals are more likely to be approved and granted time with the telescopes than female-led research projects.

Only a third of applying research teams are granted time on the telescopes, so the odds are stacked against scientists to begin with. But the new study, carried out by STScI researcher Neill Reid found the odds of approval are even less if a woman is the team's principle investigator. Reid said the discrepancy in any given year is small, but worryingly consistent.

"The offsets are small enough that they might be ascribed to chance for any single cycle," Reid wrote, "but the consistent pattern suggests the presence of a systematic effect."

The study is currently publicly available in the early-release online journal arXiv, and it is set to be published in the upcoming issue of the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

"There is growing recognition in the community that unconscious biases can play an important role in all decision making processes, even those related to the 'hard' sciences," Reid wrote in 2013, explaining the motivation for his ongoing research.

The researchers acknowledged it's possible the female-led proposals are simply less compelling than other proposals, but said such a scenario is unlikely, given that almost research proposals are written by a team of males and females. The only relevant variable seems to be the gender of the principle investigator.

2014 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.

See the article here:

Research shows gender bias in approval for Hubble Telescope use

New Study Looks Into Hubble Telescope Gender Bias

Posted on by

September 25, 2014

Image Caption: The Space Shuttle Atlantis moves away from Hubble after the telescopes release on May 19, 2009 concluded Servicing Mission 4. The Soft Capture Mechanism, a ring that a future robotic mission can grapple in order to de-orbit the telescope, is visible in the center. Credit: NASA

April Flowers for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Out of every four proposals submitted to gain observation time on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), three are denied. You might think that these denials are based strictly on the merits of the study being proposed and the current viewing patterns of the telescope, but you would be wrong.

A new internal study from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), published online currently on arXiv and coming soon to an issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, reveals that gender plays a subtle, but distinct role in proposal acceptance as well. As Clara Moskowitz of Scientific American reports, in each of the last 11 proposal cycles, having a male principle investigator on the proposal made it more likely to be accepted.

Its fascinating and disturbing, Yale University astronomer Dr. Meg Urry, who formerly led the Hubble proposal review committee for several years, told Moskowitz. Urry, who feels frustrated that some of the results were during her tenure, continued, I made a lot of efforts to have women on the review committees, and during the review I spent time listening to the deliberations of each panel. I never heard anything that struck me as discriminationand my antennae are definitely tuned for such thingsso its clear the bias is very subtle, and that both men and women are biased.

First of all, HST proposals are written by teams of both men and women, each of whom contributes to the proposal and ensures its a good one, she told David Freeman of the Huffington Post. So the PI alone doesnt have that much impact on the quality of the proposal. More importantly, biases against women in STEM and other male-dominated professions have been seen in hundreds, perhaps thousands of social science experiments. So it would be very unusual if somehow astronomers were immune to the biases shared broadly by men and women in the U.S.

STScI, which administrates the HST program, initiated the study about two years ago. The research team manually reviewed all of the proposals for the last 11 cycles and then categorized them by principal investigators gender. They found that applications submitted by men fared better than those submitted by women in every cycle.

It isnt a large difference, maybe four or five fewer proposals from women selected each cycle than statistics say should be chosen based on the number of proposals submitted. You can kind of explain it away as just sampling statistics in any given cycle, but it happens every year, Neill Reid, an STScI astronomer who oversees time allocation for Hubble, told Moskowitz. It is a systematic effect. The researchers found that effect is stronger for older principal investigators (PIs); among recent graduates, the success rates for men and women are closer to equal. I could speculate whether the proposals are being written in a different way or whether the younger astronomers are more visible because theyre giving more talks. Maybe it has something to do with the institutions theyre at, Reid said.

The STScI team has no data concerning the cause or causes of the gender imbalance, so they plan to re-analyze the data to find contributing factors before consulting with social scientists who research bias to develop strategies to fight this trend.

Read more:

New Study Looks Into Hubble Telescope Gender Bias

Stunning Galaxy Looks Deceptively Young in Hubble Telescope Views (Photo, Video)

Posted on by

A stunning new photo snapped by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shines a light on a mysterious galaxy that may be considerably older than it looks.

Our own Milky Way galaxy formed about 13 billion years ago, and most galaxies in its neighborhood are similarly old. But one galaxy just 39 million light-years away known as DDO 68 seems to be significantly younger, more like the galaxies lying several billion light-years away.

Galaxiesevolve over billions of years, so astronomers must study snapshots of them in various stages of development in order to understand the process. Because early galaxies lie billions of light-yearsfrom the Milky Way, they appear small and fainter than their older cousins, making them more challenging to observe. If DDO 68 is indeed relatively young, it would offer astronomers a more accessible target.

DDO 68, also known as UGC 5340, bears a strong similarity to early galaxies in its structure, appearance, and composition, researchers said.

For example, DDO 68 appears to have a less metal-rich environment than its older neighbors do. Young galaxies have fewer heavy elements, or metals, in their chemical makeup because such metals are made in the hearts of starsand are released through the star explosions known as supernovas. As each generation of stars reaches an end, more and more metals pollute the otherwise-primordial composition of the galaxy.

Galaxies are also dated by studying the ages of its stars. For some time, the stellar population of DDO 68 was thought to be around 1 billion years old, far younger than the suns 5 billion-year age. A recent examinationof the mysterious galaxy in archival Hubble images, however, revealed red giant stars (the next major phase of the suns evolution), while other studies also suggest the presence of older stars.

When taken with other evidence, the findings suggest that DDO 68 is at least 10 billion years old not a young galaxy after all. But more complex modeling is required to understand its nature, researchers said.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookor Google+. Originally published onSpace.com.

Read this article:

Stunning Galaxy Looks Deceptively Young in Hubble Telescope Views (Photo, Video)


  1. Hubble Telescope