As I write this overdue post, the crew of STS-125 wrestles with two pieces of outdated technology: the Hubble Space Telescope and the Space Shuttle Atlantis. Outdated, yet history-making: the telescope for making it possible to see unprecedented detail in planets, nebulas, and galaxies beyond our own; the shuttle for making it possible to think about space travel the way people once must have thought about flying from the US to Europe (expensive, somewhat dangerous, and not quite routine, but no longer unimaginable or even exotic).
Arguably Hubble and the Atlantis both have exceeded any reasonably expected operational lifetime (alas, the same cannot be said of two other space shuttles, whose brave crewmembers lost their lives in pursuit of a shared dream). Hubble, in particular, has avoided being blasted by space junk; has been successfully brought to focus despite its mistakenly misshapen main mirror; and has survived myriad mechanical, electrical, and computational glitches (some fixed remotely, others by spacewalking astronauts during previous shuttle missions).
When it was but a gleam in its designers' eyes, Hubble also avoided a stillbirth at the hands of an American Congress reluctant to pay what eventually turned out to be an estimated $2 billion tab - an amount that many politicians and even some astronomers thought could have been better spent in other ways. (When you add in the costs of the instrument upgrades, operation and research funding, and shuttle flights, the entire Hubble mission may by now have cost US and European - yes, European! - taxpayers well north of 10 billion dollars.)
Whatever the costs and missteps that one could cynically (and legitimately) focus upon when reflecting upon Hubble's saga, there's no question that the orbiting observatory has inspired millions with its razor-sharp images. Thirteen admittedly biased commentators discuss their favorite Hubble images in this NPR audiovisual. (I hoped to be among them; but, alas, I was not chosen from the 47 would-be talking heads who answered - on Facebook! - a recent call for submissions by NPR reporter Nell Greenfieldboyce. But those of you with Facebook accounts can read my musings by searching for "American Astronomical Society" and then finding the relevant Discussion on the Society's Facebook page.)
While Hubble gets its final facelift, Europe hopes to launch not one, but two, new space telescopes to a deeper, colder corner of the inner solar system than Hubble inhabits in its Earth-hugging orbit. The Herschel telescope - named after John Herschel, an 18th-century pioneer in astronomy, telescope construction, and photography - will be, by far, the largest yet deployed to gather infrared light from distant galaxies. Such light is created when stars are cloaked within light-smothering clouds of dusty gas, and when very distant galaxies have their starlight stretched by universe's expansion.
The Planck telescope, for its part, will take the most detailed pictures yet of the universe's infancy, capturing microwaves that began life as leftover heat just minutes after the Big Bang. Cosmologists hope that Planck will pick up super-subtle ripples in the microwave sky, ripples imprinted by the passage of so-called gravitational waves. Such waves are predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, and are part and parcel of the so-called inflation theory - the most popular theory at present for our universe's origins.
That millions of eyes will be peering skyward (or screenward) to follow these exciting space missions gives me hope, even as parts of the world descend into chaos or reel from the brutality of war - an all-too-human barbarism that some supposedly smart physicists naively thought they would eliminate from the face of the earth by building the atom bomb. At least there perhaps is some justice insofar as the Internet - the offshoot of an American defense project, after all - brings news of these missions and their eventual discoveries to people all over the world, crossing time zones, socioeconomic boundaries, and geopolitical borders. Swords, every so often, it seems, can be beaten into plowshares.
Copyright 2009 Joshua Roth.