Yesterday , NASA announce a milestonein the almost 22 - yr account of its Hubble Space Telescope : The 10,000th refereed scientific theme based on Hubble data has now been published , reward that Hubble is one of the most successful astronomical experiments in human chronicle .
Many people will see this as an incredible achievement — a will to humanity ’s indomitable spirit of query . But make no fault that others will get wind this news program and ask “ why ? ”
They ’ll ask why we go on to strive to see further and deeper into space than ever before , without knowing what we ’ll obtain . They ’ll postulate why we take a firm stand upon exploring a solar system that , by their explanation , has no straightaway bearing on our living . And they ’ll enquire why , in light of late budgetary crisis , space agency the world over deserve funding to assay out response to the mysteries of a Universe that we will never fully empathize .
And the simple-minded answer I can do up with is this : because when it comes to exploring the cosmic neck of the woods we call our Universe , humanness has yet to even fix foot outside the household . We have only just begun to calculate upon our solar organization , galaxy and universe , and there is so much more to explore that we can not even begin to speculate on what lies before us , waiting to be discovered . To not venture outside and take a look around would be not only slow , but irresponsible .
Last month , I had the chance to utter with astrophysicistMichael Shara — curator of the American Museum of Natural History ’s department of astrophysics — aboutthe future tense of human blank space exploration . Shara uses information generated from Hubble for his own research , and , as an stargazer at theSpace Telescope Science Institute , was responsible for the telescope ’s match review committees in the 80 ’s and 90 ’s — so it was really only a issue of time before the topic of our discussion turned to Hubble .
What does the hereafter of blank exploration grasp ?
And while Shara was agile to acknowledge the telescope ’s impressive scientific note value , it was what he had to say about its so - called replacement — the James Webb Space Telescope — that has really stuck with me ; and it ’s something that I conceive appropriate the signification of space exploration particularly well .
Shara told me that the James Webb Space Telescope has , in many manner , 100 time the capabilities of Hubble . “ There is n’t a field in all of astrophysics that it will not benefit tremendously , ” he say . “ Just as Hubble was an tremendous leap forward for all of astrophysics … I find it almost unsufferable to believe that we wo n’t make the same kinds of discoveries with the James Webb Telescope . ”
Shara then directed my attention to a book that he keeps in his office , title Science with the Hubble Space Telescope .
He excuse that if you had asked astronomers back in the 1980 ’s what Hubble would give away , they would have extend up a whole list of idea , based on what Hubble had been designed to search and make sense of . That list , explains Shara , is the contents of Science with the Hubble Space Telescope . It was , in Shara ’s run-in , a list of “ excellent ideas , ” a “ design for the first five years of operation of the Hubble Space Telescope . ”
“ But interestingly enough , the not bad findings of Hubble are not in here , ” he said with a smiling ;
They ’re not here . Because once you started attend thing with Hubble that you ’d never ascertain before , you pushed it hard and harder to do new things , and the form of things that are being done with Hubble today are very dissimilar from [ the things in this book ] .
The same will take place with the James Webb Space Telescope . We will fall upon Modern things that we have no way of knowing about today , no way of guessing ; our intuition is n’t able to take us there . And those will be the great discoveries that will actually show up in the hail 20 year , in the coming 30 long time .
[ ViaNASA ]
Top image of NGC2818 by Hubble Space Telescope via NASA
AstronomyAstrophysicsScienceSpace
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