by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a NOVA episode called “Invisible Universe Revealed” that
told the entire history of the Hubble space telescope, from its origins as a
NASA proposal in the 1960’s — it was advanced by a woman astronomer named Nancy
Roman, who got a job with NASA after she couldn’t get a tenure-track teaching
job because it was 1959 and she was a woman (it’s amazing that that kind of
shit was still going on in my lifetime!) — and targeted by Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin, who was
first elected in 1957 to fill Joseph McCarthy’s seat after McCarthy died) as
one of the wasteful government projects he thought should be canceled. The
appropriation nonetheless went through in 1977 and the Hubble duly got launched
in 1990 — and promptly became a national laughingstock because its elaborate
array of cameras and mirrors produced only blurry images that were
scientifically useless. It turned out one of the mirrors had been ground about
two micrometers too flat, and a crew of astronauts from the space shuttle had
to install an array of new mirrors that looked like a shower head (and they
were designed by a man who actually got the idea for the corrective mirror from a shower head!). Hubble has been serviced in space
five times in all, though after the last mission in 2009 the space shuttle was
decommissioned so it will eventually fall to earth and vaporize like any other
satellite (though there’s a plan by NASA to brake it in space so at least the
mirrors can be salvaged).
The most interesting aspect of the Hubble was that it
actually did advance our knowledge of the universe, not only that it’s
expanding but the rate of its expansion is actually increasing (earlier astronomers had thought it would slow
down due to the force of gravity), and that every galaxy contains a black hole
at its core that basically provides the gravitational “glue” that holds it
together. The Hubble (named for Edwin Hubble, the 1920’s astronomer who first
realized that there were other galaxies in space — before that all scientists,
including Albert Einstein, had simply assumed our Milky Way galaxy was the only
one) also discovered the mysterious and still not understood force called “dark
energy.” The Hubble’s images are absolutely fascinating aesthetically and also
have proven scientifically important — they’ve given us our first views of the
formation of stars, and incidentally confirmed the modern theories of star
formation that hold (among other things) that all stars have solar systems — planets are an
inevitable result of the way stars are formed — which means that if every star
has planets, the odds that there is life elsewhere in the universe are vastly
increased. The PBS show on the Hubble was first aired in April 2015 and is a
good deal better than the rather tacky DVD on the Hubble I’d seen earlier, 15
Years of Discovery (it’s been 26 years of
discovery so far and, even though the demise of the shuttle program means it
can no longer be serviced in space, it’s still up there, still taking stunning
pictures of star formations, planetary nebulae — which are the detritus of
dying stars — and the Cepheid variable stars and supernovas that proved the
existence of other galaxies and the expansion of the universe in the first
place).
