Hubble

IT HAS BEEN our eye on the universe, peering farther into space than had ever been done before. A billion times more! With its cameras clicking and spectrographs turning, the Hubble Space Telescope offers stargazers and scientists a view once only imagined. And what a razzle-dazzle, nerve-firing view - the largest volcano in the solar system, a roiling storm on Saturn, black holes, dying stars, galaxies in the making. This bus-sized telescope in the sky has popularized the science of astronomy in a palpable way for those of us who can't define spectroscopy.

When science center directors from around the country gather in Baltimore this month for their annual conference, they'll be able to see one of the largest scientific instruments ever made: a full-scale mock-up of the James Webb Space Telescope. Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor working to assemble the $8.7 billion Webb telescope, plans to erect a four-story-high replica of it as a free public attraction along the promenade outside the Maryland Science Center . Planned as a replacement for the 21-year-old Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb project has been described as the "space observatory of the next decade" - larger and far more powerful than the Hubble.

Pushing the Hubble Space Telescope's newest camera to its limits, astronomers say they have captured images of some of the most distant galaxies ever seen - more than 13 billion light years away. Amid a swarm of oddly shaped objects in the photograph are some dim, reddish spots that the scientists believe to be some of the earliest galaxies ever formed, seen as they appeared just 600 million years after the Big Bang that marked the beginning of the universe. "Preliminary indications are that we are indeed seeing some galaxies at [greater distances]

The Baltimore astrophysicist credited with discovering "dark energy," the mysterious force believed to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, says he has used the Hubble Space Telescope to disprove a competing explanation for the phenomenon. Adam Riess, of the Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute, says his team, using Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3, was able to look at more stars, in both visible and infrared wavelengths. That eliminated errors introduced in previous work, which compared measurements from Hubble and other telescopes.

On May 15, 2005 HARRIETT I. HUBBLE; beloved wife of Howard H. Hubble; devoted mother of Anita (Kenneth) Reich, Richard (Regina) Hubble, Laurie Ehrhardt; loving grandmother of Michael Reich, Garrett and April Ehrhardt, Drew and Hailey Hubble; dear sister of Ann Hobbs and David Sutton. Also survived by three great grandchildren. Family will receive friends Tuesday 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 P.M. at HARRY H. WITZKE'S FAMILY FUNERAL HOME, INC., 4112 Old Columbia Pike, Ellicott City, where a funeral service will be held Wednesday 11 A.M. Entombment Crest Lawn Memorial Gardens.

On Monday, June 9, 2003, JACK S. HUBBLE, 60, of Belleville, IL, born May 31, 1943 in Bel Air, MD. Mr Hubble was an electrician and builder of homes. He was a member of the Waterloo Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses. He was preceded in death by his mother, Margaret I., nee Pyle, Hubble. Surviving are his wife, Jane, nee Bridges, Hubble and his father, Harry L. Hubble of White Hall, MD. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses or to Hubble Brain Tumor Survivors Foundation, a foundation@NHF.

Suddenly on January 19, 2005, JOHN DELANEY HUBBLE, SR., beloved husband of Nancy C. Hubble (nee Perrera), devoted father of Karen Hubble Bisbee and the late John D. Hubble, Jr., dear grandfather of Abigail Churchill Bisbee, son-in-law of Dorothy M. Brittingham; father-in-law of Stephen F. Bisbee. The family will receive friends at the family owned Ruck Towson Funeral Home, Inc., 1050 York Rd., (bltwy exit 26A), on Saturday from 6 to 8 P.M. and Sunday from 2 to 4 and 6 to 8 P.M. Funeral Services will be held in the Church of the Redeemer, 5603 N. Charles St., at Melrose Ave., on Monday at 11 A.M. Interment in Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens.

On May 12, 2005, MARGARET MARY HUBBLE (nee De Carlo), beloved wife of the late Carl E. Hubble; loving mother of Robert L. Hubble and his wife George, Linda Hartman, and Sharon Flynn and her husband Tom; dear sister of Virginia Stanley; dear aunt/Godmother of Sandy Stemmer; devoted grandmother of six and great-grandmother of five. Friends may all at the family owned EVANS CHAPEL OF MEMORIES-PARKVILLE (8800 Harford Road) from 3 to 5 and 7 to 9 P.M., Sunday. A Funeral Service will be held in the funeral home chapel on Monday at 10 A.M. Interment Maryland Veterans Cemetery at Garrison Forest.

THIS IS about the time we were expecting a rescue mission to be announced that would save two popular space programs. A space shuttle team would be dispatched to repair and update aging equipment on the Hubble Space Telescope, thus extending the life of an invaluable scientific tool. And the shuttle mission would mark the resumption of manned space flight, which has been halted for two years, since Columbia's explosion over Texas. Experts have cleared the safety risk; Congress has voted its approval.

Continuing technology glitches aboard the Hubble Space Telescope -- this time balky gyroscopes -- may push the National Aeronautics and Space Administration into an emergency rescue mission a year sooner than the planned 1993 flight to fix flawed optics.Project managers may face a Hobson's choice: fix the gyroscopes, whose complete failure would end the Hubble's usefulness, and live with the degraded performance of the flawed main mirror, or gamble that neither the gyroscopes nor the oscillating solar arrays will fail so catastrophically they cut short Hubble's life.

Ralph Vanderlipp, an electrical engineer whose work spanned the eras from World War II to the space age and into the computer age, died Nov. 3 of leukemia at Gilchrest Hospice Care in Towson. The long-time Columbia resident was 83. From serving as an electronics and radar technician on a cargo ship during the waning days of World War II to helping interpret data from the Hubble Space telescope, Mr. Vanderlipp spent decades on the cutting edge of electronics technology. "If you were to look up 'electrical engineer' in the dictionary, you would see his picture," said Bill Anderson, who was a young aerospace engineer working under contract for Lockheed-Martin when he first met Mr. Vanderlipp and considered him a mentor.

Annapolis Chorale music director J. Ernest Green closed the group's classical music season last weekend on a triumphant note with two performances of Joseph Haydn's "The Creation." Haydn's 1798 oratorio — scored for soprano, tenor and baritone soloists, chorus and orchestra — tells the story of the six days of creation. During the chorale's performance, it was given a powerful visual dimension through projected Hubble telescope images of Earth. Haydn and Hubble became a harmonious pairing, along with Renaissance masters Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, whose depictions of the creation of man joined hundreds of photos illustrating the infinite variety of human beauty.

"Hubble 3D," a celebration of the orbiting space telescope and the NASA crew that gave it new life last year, provides a glimpse of how star systems looked a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. It reveals the borders of the visible universe. It drinks in the spectacle of celestial bodies born in fiery pillars of clouds. The content is scientific. The imagery gets biblical. In fact, after Baltimore-based astronaut John Grunsfeld witnessed a positive power check on a Hubble camera he'd installed, he said, "Let there be light."

With time running out for the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers in Baltimore and around the world are gearing up for the biggest research project ever mounted on the orbiting observatory. Later this year, astronomers from dozens of institutions will begin gathering images of more than 250,000 of the most distant galaxies in the universe. They will seek answers to some of astronomy's biggest questions - queries that go to the origins of the universe itself. There is a sense of urgency to the effort.

When he applied for the No. 2 job at the Space Telescope Science Institute, John Grunsfeld hit on a way to stand out from other candidates. First, he loaded a cover letter and a resume onto a memory stick. Then he took it with him into space. The astrophysicist, then on his third mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, waited until the space shuttle's robot arm had grabbed the orbiting observatory before he fired off his note. "He actually used the words, 'I am holding Hubble hostage until you read my application,' " the institute's director, Matt Mountain, recalled.

When the Hubble Space Telescope was first proposed, the New York Times ran a story saying that Baltimore would become the center of the universe for astronomy. The reality is that because of the Hubble's problems, it's become instead one of a handful of major observatories around the world. A notable achievement, but much less than was hoped.Although the Hubble can still be fixed, we're talking about the proverbial race against time here: The telescope is expected to last only about 15 years before major systems begin to fail and fixing it becomes impractical.