Audio Script
Hubble Space Telescope 鈥� 25 years and still discovering
April 24, 2015听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听听 Michael Shull
25 years ago today that shiny, bus-sized silver tube we call the Hubble Space Telescope was put into orbit 340 miles above Earth. And ever since it has dazzled us with breathtaking pictures of nebulae, stars and galaxies and much more, says Michael Shull, an astrophysicist at CU-Boulder.
CUT 1 鈥淲hat it really has accomplished is far beyond what people expected. They had a list of three or four major items they wanted to do and they did those. (:10) But, the undiscovered, unexpected discoveries - the fact that the intergalactic medium is full of matter, that there are gamma ray bursts they could find, that there were galaxies 13 billion light-years away - none of that was expected.鈥� (:25)
But things weren鈥檛 always that wonderful for Hubble. The mirror was manufactured incorrectly, resulting in blurry images. But NASA found a solution and sent astronauts to fix the billion-dollar instrument and finally, three years later, stunning pictures and new discoveries were the norm and not the exception.
CUT 2 鈥淚 thought, 鈥極kay, now we鈥檙e good to go for ten or fifteen more years.鈥� I had no idea it would be 25 years. The secret weapon was the astronauts and the space shuttle, which visited Hubble five times. (:11) Every time they went up they were able to fix it, make it better, add new instruments, one of which was ours that we built at CU with Ball Aerospace. But these cameras are fantastic now.鈥� (:21)
That instrument is called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or COS. Shull says it spreads all the light emitting from distant objects in space into its component colors in the ultraviolet 鈥� invisible to humans on Earth -听 allowing Shull and other researchers to study quasars, exploding stars and other hot matter in space.
CUT 3 鈥淭he most interesting thing that we鈥檝e found, our group, is huge amounts of gas reservoirs out in between the galaxies and in the halo of our galaxy. (:10) We鈥檙e pretty sure a lot of it was left over from the Big Bang. It鈥檚 fairly pristine matter, it never fell into the Milky Way, and it鈥檚 still out there in between the galaxies.鈥� (:20)
Shull says Hubble has expanded our ability to study the origin of the universe and Earth-like planets.
CUT 4 鈥淚 think two things stand out. One is the origin of our universe, its age, the Big Bang theory. And the new really exciting thing is extrasolar planets and Hubble鈥檚 been involved in that game too.鈥� (12)
In 2009, astronauts installed new batteries, cameras and gyroscopes on Hubble and it鈥檚 expected to last another five years. It鈥檚 successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch in 2018.
-CU-