Hubble, we hardly knew ye

Thanks to Bush's visionary "Send Halliburton to Mars" space plan, NASA will be sending the Hubble Space Telescope to a premature grave:

The Hubble Space Telescope will be allowed to degrade and
eventually become useless, as NASA changes focus to President Bush's
plans to send humans to the moon, Mars and beyond, officials said
Friday. NASA canceled all space shuttle servicing missions to the
Hubble, which has revolutionized the study of astronomy with its
striking images of the universe. The Hubble has revolutionized
astronomy. Using images from the craft, scientists have determined the
age of the universe, about 13.7 billion years, and discovered that a
mysterious energy, called the dark force, is causing all of the objects
in the universe to move apart at an accelerating rate. This force is
still poorly understood. Images from the Hubble glimpsed galaxies back
to a point just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, thought
to be the explosive beginning of the universe. Astronomers have found
that galaxies and clusters of galaxies formed much earlier that
theorists had expected. This suggests that planets where life was
possible could have formed as early as about 12 billion years ago. The
solar system, which includes the sun and Earth, is much younger, about
5 billion years old.

Click here for a look back at some of the most arresting images in the history of astronomy.

Eerie, dramatic pictures from the Hubble telescope show newborn stars
emerging from "eggs" ? not the barnyard variety ? but rather, dense,
compact pockets of interstellar gas called evaporating gaseous globules
(EGGs). Hubble found the "EGGs," appropriately enough, in the Eagle
nebula, a nearby star-forming region 7,000 light-years from Earth in
the constellation Serpens.

Posted by flow Frazao on January 20, 2004 at 10:37 AM | Permalink