It's been 25 years since the Hubble launched and changed how we look at space forever,
but even though it's probably the most famous -- there are 93 space telescopes out there!
WHAT!?
Hey space cadets, Trace here scoping out the science for DNews.
In 1610, Galileo took a telescope and pointed it at Jupiter -- igniting a love for space
that goes far beyond simple naked-eye stargazing.
The ultimate in astral gazing is the space telescope, an imager not affected by the interference
of stuff here on earth like clouds, weather, particulates in the atmosphere, or the light
pollution of a nearby city!
The most famous of which, The Hubble Space Telescope just reached its 25th birthday!!
(blow thing) Happy Birthday, Hubble!
The HST isn't the largest one up there, but it's versatile, capturing visible and ultraviolet
light with a bit of infrared sensing.
Hubble, orbits 353 miles (569 km) above Earth, and was designed to be serviced in space by
astronauts; something no other space telescope has done.
Which is lucky, since it famously needed to be fixed right after it was launched.
Hubble's final servicing mission in 2009 should keep it running until 2020, but eventually
it will die -- so what then?
Along comes the James Webb!
The James Webb Space Telescope is Hubble's successor.
Its mirror is 7 times larger than Hubble's - the total surface area is the size of a
tennis court!
But while it's the follow-up to the HST, it's not identical.
It captures mainly infrared light, because its larger mirror is designed to look WAY
farther into the universe -- and the farther things get away, the more redshifted they
are.
Redshifting is the tendency for the light of distant objects to elongate -- or shift
toward the redder end of the light spectrum.
To look far away, we need an infrared telescope!
The James Webb will also be even FARTHER from Earth -- orbiting at LaGrange point 2.
A LaGrange point is a spot in space where gravity from the moon and the Earth balance
-- like a gravitational parking spot!
L2 is actually out PAST the moon!
It's the perfect spot for a telescope -- like Planck, which is already there.
See, we're only looking at a tiny part of the picture with Webb and Hubble; infrared,
ultraviolet, and visible light.
We've got way shorter and way longer.
Infrared is longer than visible, and microwaves are longer than infrared!
Microwave telescopes scan the microwaves coming out of stars, but more importantly, the bubble
of microwave radiation which exploded from the Big Bang.
The European Space Agency's Planck satellite was launched in 2009 with the goal of imaging
that bubble of microwave radiation which surrounds our whole universe: called the Cosmic Microwave
Background radiation.
This bubble is 13.7 billion year-old energy; and can tell us a lot about the birth of our
universe.
The ESA says, Planck is so advanced, it will take measurements which cannot be improved
on with any future telescopes.
But that's not all for long waves.
In 2011, Spektr-R was launched by Russia to look at the last wider band of the EM spectrum,
radio.
The Spektr-R has a 10 meter (33ft) radio telescope to observe the structure of galaxies, star
formations, black holes, dark matter and interstellar space -- things we can't pick up with the
nearer visible spectrum.
Because these waves are so long, the Spektr-R works with ground-based telescopes to pick
up as much of the radio signals as possible!
As far as shorter wave telescopes, the Chandra X-Ray Space Observatory was launched in 1999,
and has been sucking in x-rays from the hottest things in the galaxy.
Literally.
X-rays are absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, so Chandra uses four angled mirrors to look
at x-rays from exploded stars, clusters of galaxies, and matter around black holes while
in orbit.
Scientists are using this data to learn what happens around supernovae and the structure
of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
This thing is tight, but not as tight as gamma rays.
The Fermi Gamma Ray telescope was launched in 2008 to probe the upper edge of the electromagnetic
spectrum, looking for gamma rays, the tiniest and most energetic of all light.
Gamma radiation is put out by supermassive black-hole systems, pulsars, and often makes
up cosmic rays; and studying these emanations can teach us more about physics in the universe,
giving rise to new theories about how everything fits together.
Gamma waves are superfast, often zooming by in a fraction of a second, so Fermi looks
at one fifth of the sky at any given moment, so it doesn't miss a burst!
There's a reason telescopes are everywhere on Earth and in space.
They're like Earth's eyes and ears out there -- pointing at the universe.
It's beautiful ain't it?
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