Observatory

GREENBELT -- When folks at the Goddard Space Flight Center talk, Hubble listens.And then the flying space telescope -- the size of a city bus with wings -- responds. It turns its myopic eye toward a speck of light in the galaxy and locks onto it. It snaps a picture of a storm swirling around Saturn. It waits until a spinning blue ball called Earth passes from its field of vision so it can peer into the heavens again.All of this and so much more has gone on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for three years and counting, because the Hubble Space Telescope never sleeps.

The Astro space telescope, which seemed doomed by budget cuts, will be revived and scheduled for a second space shuttle flight, officials said today.Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., said NASA's budget was "scrubbed down" to find the money to keep the program alive in the form of an Astro-2 mission expected to cost $30 million.Astro was designed to explore some of the hottest and most violent regions of space, which generate radiation in the X-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths that cannot be observed from the ground.

Tip No. 1 for a trip to Green Bank, W.Va.: Pack lots of CDs. If you hit the "scan" button on your car radio, all you will get is an endless display of numbers as the radio searches vainly for a station. There aren't any. There isn't much else out here in east-central West Virginia, either -- just an occasional farm, a logging truck or, scampering back into the Monongahela National Forest, a deer. The trip here, via routes 55 and 28, winds up into the clouds where snakes of mist curl around the road.

At a ceremony on June 6, the Naval Academy's Class of 1941 will dedicate a new observatory that houses a restored refracting telescope.The observatory is a gift from the Class of 1941 to the Naval Academy on the 50th anniversary of their graduation.The new observatory sits on a knoll just off Decatur Road by the bridge over Dorsey Creek. Until the early part of this century, the observatory was located along the shoreline between the Chapel and where Chauvenet Hall now stands. Inside the old observatory was a refracting telescope with a 7.75-inch lens ground in 1857 by Alvan Clark and Sons of Cambridgeport, Mass.

This year's Starscape Festival will feature performances from Flux Pavilion, Ghostland Observatory, Wolfgang Gartner and more on its main stage, according to a press release. Going on its 14th year, Baltimore's electronic dance music festival will once again take place at Fort Armistead Park on June 9. Here's a full list of the performers by stage: MAIN STAGE     Wolfgang Gartner Chase & Status  Flux Pavilion Sphongle Soundsystem Ghostland Observatory Modestep M Machine Phuture Primitive   BASS DROP DANCE TENT   Dada Life Zedd Kill the Noise Donald Glaude Lucky Date Tittsworth Charles Feelgood Lock Danon   THE SUNRISE STAGE   Conspirator Beats Antique Mimosa Papadosio Adventure Club Paper Diamond Ill Esha Alpha Data    DUB NATION BEACH STAGE   Noisia Camo & Krooked Dillon Francis Funtcase Zomboy Figure Skism Terravita J Rabbit Schoolboy SPECIAL B2B SET Dieselboy & Bare The Starscape Festival: The Garden of Eden is scheduled to begin at 2 p.m. and last until 6 a.m., or until you're really, really exhausted.

GREENBELT -- Problems with a telescope pointing system have delayed by at least 12 hours the start of astronomical observations by the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope and three others aboard the space shuttle, Columbia scientists said today."

Sam Durrance thought he'd never fly in space again after his long-delayed trip with the $150 million Astro observatory aboard the space shuttle Columbia in mid-December.Originally scheduled for as many as six flights, the NASA package of ultraviolet and X-ray telescopes appeared early this year to be doomed to just the one mission by budget cuts and infrequent shuttle launches.But the Johns Hopkins astrophysicist and many of his Astro colleagues are now cautiously optimistic about another flight, thanks to the science achieved in December, heavy lobbying by Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md.

A new whooping crane observatory at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center will allow the public to see the endangered cranes up-close and year-round for the first time. A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the observatory was held at the research center's 75th anniversary celebration and Wildlife Festival Saturday, Oct. 15, while live footage of the cranes streamed from the observatory. "Only a handful of people have seen whooping cranes," Greg Smith, director of the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, said.

Astronomers who chose their profession for the romance of cold, starry nights under an observatory dome may soon find they're making even more of their discoveries seated at their office computers. The National Science Foundation has launched a five-year, $10 million project to develop a National Virtual Observatory that will enable scientists, teachers and students to study the stars and galaxies at warp speed, by gazing into the vast data archives of the world's top observatories. "The same work could be done now, but it might take a scientist 10 years to reach a certain result," said Eileen Friel, who heads the science foundation's astronomy division.

In a significant step toward a new era in astronomy, NASA picked the company yesterday that will build the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope. TRW of Redondo Beach, Calif., won the $825 million contract to design and build the new space observatory, dubbed the James Webb Space Telescope after a former NASA chief. The telescope, expected to launch in 2010, was formerly known as the Next Generation Space Telescope. The Webb Space Telescope will search for cosmic clues to how the first stars and galaxies formed, events which are thought to have occurred only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.