Category Archives: Hubble Telescope

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).

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

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.

Read the original here:
NASA's Hubble Telescope Finds Potential Kuiper Belt Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission

An artist's rendering of a Kuiper Belt object, about 4 billion miles from the sun, which may be reachable by the Boulder-director New Horizons mission, (Courtesy illustration / NASA, aESA and G. Bacon)

The New Horizons mission to Pluto, a space adventure with strong Boulder ties, now has three new targets for its work in the distant reaches of our solar system.

NASA announced Wednesday that its Hubble telescope, through a dedicated observing program overseen by a New Horizons search team, had discovered three Kuiper Belt objects that the New Horizons spacecraft could possibly visit after it passes Pluto in July.

Alan Stern of Boulder's Southwest Research Institute is the principal investigator on the New Horizons mission, University of Colorado professor Fran Bagenal is a co-investigator, and the spacecraft carries an instrument known as the Student Dust Counter, designed and built by CU undergraduate and graduate students.

"The problem is that we wanted to go somewhere after Pluto, to compare Pluto with another object," Bagenal said Wednesday. That object was going to have to be on generally the same trajectory New Horizons is taking to Pluto, because its available fuel would permit no more than a 2 degree change in its current course beyond Pluto.

"If we hadn't been able to find a target (beyond Pluto) we'd be sailing off into nothingness," Stern said.

The New Horizons team started searching for suitable Kuiper Belt objects three years ago with some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth. They found several dozen KBOs, as they are known, but none could be reached with the fuel available on the New Horizons spacecraft.

The team was awarded Hubble telescope time by the Space Telescope Science Institute for a wider survey in July. By the time the search was finished last month, they identified one KBO that is considered "definitely reachable," and two others that may be accessible, but that will require more tracking over several months to know whether they also can be reached.

They are about 1 billion miles beyond Pluto, ranging in size from 34 miles across down to 15 miles across. Each is about 10 times the size of a typical comet and about 1 to 2 percent the size of Pluto.

"It's a big relief, because it means we get double the targets and double the science, right?" Bagenal said. "From what we've seen of the objects in the Kuiper Belt, they are all different colors, their composition and sizes differ, some of them have moons, some of them have atmosphere, some don't have atmosphere. So, getting to two out of the thousands-plus that we know are there will be at least twice as good as one."

Visit link:
New Horizons space mission with Boulder ties finds new targets beyond Pluto

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.

See original here:
The explosive beauty of a dying star

Week 2 - 20 Years Hubble Telescope NASA Video Cut Down
Description.

By: Anna Liese Call

Read the original post:
Week 2 - 20 Years Hubble Telescope NASA Video Cut Down - Video

INFORMUCATE: HUBBLE TELESCOPE
Informucate Fast Facts Videos cover thousands of topics, with more added daily.and if you like our videos, you will love our unique take on the news at http://www.informucate.com.

By: INFORMUCATE

Read this article:
INFORMUCATE: HUBBLE TELESCOPE - Video

Spiral Galaxy
The images are taken from Hubble telescope, music composed by me (Stone Cub) mixed in are samples taken from radio astronomy, of pulsars, meteor showers, the sun, comets planets.

By: Richie Cuthbertson

View post:
Spiral Galaxy - Video

Most Beautiful Galaxy?
The Sombrero Galaxy - 28 million light years from Earth - was voted the most beautiful picture taken by Hubble Telescope. The dimensions of the galaxy, are as spectacular as it #39;s appearance....

By: GlobalSunTimes

Read this article:
Most Beautiful Galaxy? - Video

Shedding Light- Hubble Telescope

By: Taran Heartnet

Original post:
Shedding Light- Hubble Telescope - Video

Hubble Telescope Ultra Deep Field View 3D
original Footage

By: http://www.youtube.com/user/tdarnell ) Animations / 3D Images by NASA / ESA.

By: sven gold

Continued here:
Hubble Telescope Ultra Deep Field View 3D - Video