Hubble

WASHINGTON -- The keen eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope are shattering scientists' pet theories about two TC fundamental questions about the universe:What is it made of? And how old is it?Astronomers said yesterday that new photographs from Hubble rule out the widely held belief that dim red stars five to 10 times smaller than the sun make up most of the invisible matter in the universe.Only about 10 percent of the mass of the universe is visible. The rest is so-called "dark matter" -- a mysterious substance that has baffled scientists since it was discovered 60 years ago."

Jason Kalirai doesn't just reach for the stars. He pulls them close and studies them — and encourages others to do so as well. Kalirai, 35, is an award-winning astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. For two years, he worked with the Hubble Space Telescope, the most powerful telescope in history, and for the past 2 1/2 years has been the deputy project scientist developing Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be 100 times more powerful than 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.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured what space scientists called potentially the "comet of the century", Comet ISON, as it speeds toward Earth at 47,000 mph. The comet, technically known as  C/2012 S1,  will pass within 1.1 million miles of Earth seven months from now, and it could be visible with the naked eye if it doesn't break up passing by the sun. It could be so bright, in fact, that it would outshine the full moon, according to...

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.

Description: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected a supernova that exploded more than 10 billion years ago, the most distant of its kind ever spotted. It was 4 percent farther away and 350 million years older than the previous record-holder, a supernova found three months ago by a team at the U.S. Energy Department's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Researchers: David O. Jones of the Johns Hopkins University was the lead author on a paper detailing the discovery.

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured distant reaches of the universe over the past 22 years, but with the end of the space shuttle program, has not been repaired since 2009. A filmmaker is challenging that decision with the documentary "Saving Hubble" and will speak in Baltimore on Tuesday. David Gaynes will speak at the Space Telescope Science Institute with his message about saving Hubble, which is expected to continue operating only through next year. NASA is focused on replacing Hubble with the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018.

Pluto may not be a full-fledged planet, but it has five moons, astronomers have discovered. The fifth one is 6 to 15 miles wide and circles the dwarf planet in a 58,000-mile orbit, according to a research team that includes one scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel. The moon is, for now, being called S/2012 (134340) 1. It was detected in nine separate sets of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 since June 26. The fact that a dwarf planet like Pluto can have so many moons is intriguing to scientists, according to NASA officials.

First, the bad news: The Andromeda galaxy, an agglomeration of 1 trillion stars that is visible to the naked eye, is hurtling through space at 250,000 miles per hour — and it's coming right at us. What's more, NASA astronomers in Baltimore said Thursday, while Andromeda barrels into our Milky Way, a companion galaxy will join in what the space agency is billing as a "titanic collision. " Now, the good news: With Andromeda still 2.5 million light years away, the collision won't take place for another 4 billion years, the astronomers said.

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.

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.

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.

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.