Hubble

Once considered a screw-up of cosmic proportions, the Hubble Space Telescope has turned into the comeback kid of astronomy in the year since wrench-wielding astronauts fixed its blurred vision."

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]

ROCKET SCIENTIST Michael D. Griffin's return to NASA, this time as its top administrator, seems assured. But that's the last guaranteed win the current head of the space department at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Lab can count on for a while. Mr. Griffin, with an armful of academic degrees and decades of management, flight and space program experience, is a great choice for the country's top space post. He will need all his skills to steer the research and exploration agency through its current mission shakeup.

An article in yesterday's Sun and some editions of The Evening Sun stated incorrectly that the Hubble Space Telescope's wide-field camera is part of the package of corrective mirrors, called COSTAR, installed last month. The wide field camera is a separate instrument.The Sun regrets the error.Last month's repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope have paid off handsomely for scientists, and the views of stars and galaxies captured in its first pictures -- to be released today by NASA -- have left astronomers "ecstatic."

The Hubble Space Telescope, taking detailed pictures of the site of an exploding star, or supernova, has confronted astronomers with a new mystery: How to explain the appearance of two thin loops of bright gases encircling the region like a pair of Hula Hoops out in space.In describing the new Hubble pictures yesterday, Dr. Christopher Burrows, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said the rings are "are completely unlike anything we had expected to see" in the area of a supernova.

With the Space Shuttle Endeavor scheduled to lift off from Kennedy Space Center tomorrow to rendezvous with the Hubble Space Telescope, future U.S. space programs as well as the kind of Big Science typified by the orbiting observatory will once again be under scrutiny.Not incidentally, the outcome will also have an impact on whether Baltimore, home to the Space Telescope Institute on the campus of Johns Hopkins University, retains its place as one of the world's preeminent astronomical research sites.

Poor attention to detail. That is the basic conclusion of the investigative technical report into the troubles occluding the $2-billion Hubble Space Telescope's vision. Among the main findings of the investigator:* Perkin-Elmer Corp.'s Optical Operations Division ran a "closed shop." All procedures were controlled in-house and problems were kept from higher-ups in the company and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.* NASA's organizational structure made it difficult for technical personnel to convey their uncertainties about the work they were overseeing to the agency's upper echelons.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. -- With a roar and a rumble, the shuttle Endeavour blasted off early today on its much anticipated mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.A nearly full moon graced a cloudless sky as the shuttle veered over the Atlantic Ocean, climbing at 1,007 miles an hour within a minute and a half of its 4:27 a.m. liftoff. For several seconds, Endeavour was the brightest star in the Florida night sky. And, then almost as quickly, a mere 7 minutes after launch, the shuttle vanished from view, hurtling beyond the Earth's atmosphere toward its rendezvous with NASA's billion dollar telescope.

Modern astronomy and physics regularly confront the public with discoveries that exceed the wildest imaginings of science fiction writers. Ever since Einstein demonstrated the equivalence of matter and energy and the relative nature of space and time, astronomers have grappled with the mind-boggling implications of his theory, from the curvature of space to the existence of black holes.The former was confirmed experimentally within a few years of publication of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in 1915.

Perkins-Elmer, the Hughes Aircraft Co. subsidiary that manufactured the nearsighted Hubble Space Telescope mirror, has agreed to pay the government part of the cost of repairing the faulty spacecraft. The Justice Department has reached a $25 million settlement that a NASA official called "fair and reasonable."That judgment may be premature. It will cost the government about $150 million to fix the Hubble telescope now that it's already in orbit, a figure that doesn't even include the cost of the shuttle repair mission itself or any unforeseen problems.