The Hubble Space Telescope was placed into orbit by the Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. To celebrate this 25th anniversary, the National Geographic
features “Hubble’s Greatest Hits” in the new April issue. Hubble’s imaging team lead Zolt Levay has curated his top 10 celestial views of all time for the feature. The also shares the fascinating photo coloration process that help Levay and his team create Hubble’s stunning images. And writer Timothy Ferris shares background on the program in the related article.
While all previous astronaut tours on the station have been limited to less than six months, Kelly and Kornienko will spend a year aboard the space station. The goal of the One Year Crew program is to study the effects on the human body that could occur on a long space trip in microgravity to Mars and to find ways to ameliorate or prevent negative effects.
Last year Chris Jones wrote an extensive preview of the mission in an Esquire Magazine article called Away. Jones will post periodic updates on the mission in the coming year. Here is his first posting: Away: Five Days To Launch
The Kepler space observatory proved the effectiveness of the transit technique in finding exoplanets. After losing one reaction wheel too many, it was assumed that Kepler was an ex-exoplanet finder. However, the clever Kepler scientists and engineers found a way to use solar radiation pressure to keep the telescope steady in its viewing of distant stars. Now renamed the Kepler K2 mission, the observatory continues its planet spotting, albeit less efficiently than before.
So Kepler keeps adding to the list of exoplanets for now but a whole new improved exoplanet hunter is expected to go to space in August 2017. TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) will monitor more stars than Kepler and it should also do better at finding small planets, i.e. earth-sized ones, orbiting around them. TESS will monitor
the brightnesses of more than 500,000 stars during a two year mission, searching for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. Transits occur when a planet’s orbit carries it directly in front of its parent star as viewed from Earth. TESS is expected to catalog more than 3000 transiting exoplanet candidates, including a sample of ∼500 Earth-sized and ‘Super Earth’ planets, with radii less than twice that of the Earth. TESS will detect small rock-and-ice planets orbiting a diverse range of stellar types and covering a wide span of orbital periods, including rocky worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars.
Here’s a video overview of the project:
We can also hope it has much better and more numerous reaction wheels…