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ERIN: Hi, Facebook.
We're live from NASA Goddard's Space Flight Center.
I'm Erin Kisliuk and you are live in 360 at the Hubble
Space Telescope Operations Control Center.
Take a look around.
This place is the heart, soul, and the brains of the Hubble
Space Telescope who launched 28 years ago today.
Speaking of brains, we've got a couple of pretty smart
folks here to answer your questions so send them all in to
the comments section below so we can answer them during the show
and even a few after it's ended.
So without further ado, we've got Deputy Project Manager
Jim Jeletic.
JIM: Hi, Erin.
ERIN: Hey, Jim.
Thanks so much for being here.
JIM: Thanks for having me.
ERIN: So, Hubble is such an iconic, iconic mission
but it's not so young anymore.
How's Hubble doing?
(1:09) JIM: Well, science-wise it is at the peak of its
scientific capability.
It's been doing great.
In fact, this year we had more papers published on its
discoveries than ever in its 28 year history.
And as far as the spacecraft is concerned, you
know, even with all those parts that are on it that have been
flying in the harsh environment of space for 28 years, we still
have redundancy in all of its critical systems.
We're hopeful that we can continue to make these
groundbreaking observations well into the next decade.
ERIN: Into the next decade?
So, when Hubble was launched it had a life expectancy of about
15 years.
How have we managed to double that?
JIM: Well, you know we had 5 servicing missions that we
went went up on a space shuttle with astronauts and they
repaired, replaced, and upgraded its hardware over time.
And it's kinda like your cell phone you know when you get a
new cell phone you get a better camera on it a higher
resolution, you can take even better pictures.
Well, we did that with the instruments on Hubble.
Because of that it's at its peak of its capability and we're
hopeful that we can continually change our fundamental
understanding of the universe for years to come with it.
ERIN: That sounds great.
I just want to remind anyone just tuning in that we are at
NASA Goddard's Space Flight Center in Hubble Space
Telescope's Operations Control Center.
We're in 360 so take a look around while I introduce our
next guest we have Senior Project Scientist
Jennifer Wiseman joining us today.
Hi!
JENNIFER: Hi, Erin.
ERIN: Thank you so much for being here.
JENNIFER: My pleasure.
ERIN: You've been on this mission for about 11 years.
Does Hubble still do anything or show you anything that surprises
you?
JENNIFER: Oh my goodness, every year Hubble
is surprising us.
We're looking at things with Hubble now that we didn't even
imagine that we would be observing when it was launched
back in 1990.
For example, we are studying the atmospheres of
planets outside our solar system and we recently observed light
coming from a merger of neutron stars.
This event also created gravitational waves and these
are the kind of phenomena we didn't even imagine decades
ago.
ERIN: That's amazing.
And I hear Hubble sent us something amazing for its own
anniversary.
Can we talk about this image here?
JENNIFER: We have this great image of the
Lagoon Nebula.
So this is a region of gas and dust that's being churned up by
star formation.
You can see a lot of features like pillars and clumps of gas.
It's lit up because one of the stars that has recently formed
is a monster star.
It's about 200 thousand times brighter than our sun.
And it's ionizing the gas, it's creating these structures, its
winds and radiation are carving out these various pillars and
globules and so we like to think of this as kind of a
stellar nursery.
ERIN: That's amazing.
So are these two different like parts of the nebula?
Why do they look so different?
JENNIFER: So you see two images here, but they are
actually the same place.
They are both the same region of the Lagoon Nebula, but they are
looking at it with different kinds of light so Hubble can see
both visible light like our eyes can see and that's what we can
see here on the left and also infrared light which is what you
see here on the right.
And so infrared light we can actually see through a lot of
the dusty veil in front of and within the nebula.
You can see a lot of stars behind it you can see
some stars within the nebula.
And you can see these very dark globules where new smaller stars
are still incubating so it's wonderful to have Hubble's
panchromatic view of all these different colors.
It gives us different information.
ERIN: That's amazing.
And so how far away about is this?
JENNIFER: So the nebula is about 4.000 lightyears away. that's a
unit of distance that we use that basically means that the
light started its journey to us about 4,000 years ago.
Think about what was happening on Earth at that time and that's
when the light started traveling to us.
ERIN: That is extremely impressive.
For our viewers at home we are at NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center inside the Hubble Space Telescope Operations Control
Center and now I'm going to jump over and ask someone really cool
to speak with me if he has a second.
We've got systems engineer Mike Wenz.
Hi.
Thank you so much for being here.
MIKE: Hi, Erin.
You are perfectly welcome.
ERIN: So can you tell us a little bit about what goes on in
this room?
MIKE: Yeah, this is actually the room where we
control the Hubble Space Telescope.
We'll send commands up to it and we'll also receive telemetry
down from it so we can actually see how the instruments are
doing and how the telescope is doing.
In this room right here, this is where the systems engineers will
work for various circumstances.
This is actually where we did support the servicing missions
that Jim talked about where we were replacing the instruments
on Hubble that was a lot of fun working with the astronauts.
But we use this room now mainly for two reasons one of
them is if we have some sort of anomaly on the spacecraft which
is when the spacecraft does something we weren't quite
expecting and so the system engineers here try to figure out
what's going on and why it happened and what can we do to
make it not happen again.
We also use this room for testing if we are going to be
sending up new software to the instruments or new software to
the telescope.
We gotta make sure we test it out on the ground beforehand
because you don't want to be testing it out
on the spacecraft itself.
ERIN: Ok, so trick question!
What is something that Hubble do that would fall under that
unexpected category?
MIKE: One of the small anomalies that we have fairly
recently that we have once, maybe even twice a week is there
is instruments on the Hubble that allow us to point the
telescope very accurately.
To be able to take the images that Jennifer was talking about
have to be able to point and hold the telescope extremely
accurately in fact we have to able to focus on essentially on
the width of a human hair held at one mile distance.
To be able to do that is instruments that we have fine
guidance sensors.
They lock up on stars.
They actually find the stars and they lock and they hold it.
But every once in a while they'll try to lock up on a star
and they can't do it and they send information
down saying we can't do it.
So we have to come in here and we find that they are actually
lock up on single stars and that they aren't single stars but we
don't know about it on the ground yet.
No one on the ground can tell that these are double stars or
binary stars and Hubble makes these discoveries when it
actually has these anomalies.
ERIN: That's quite the silver lining.
So how about you?
What is your role?
How long have you been working with Hubble?
MIKE: I'm a systems engineer here.
I've actually been on Hubble for 26 years.
I'm one of the older guys around who've been
around here for a lot of it.
I'm actually in charge of those fine guidance sensors and those
are actually the instruments that I have to take care of.
I actually am the one who gets to come in here and find all the
double stars and variable stars that Hubble has found because
it's had trouble.
ERIN: That's an amazing job.
I'll let you get back to work.
Thank you so much for your time.
MIKE: Thank you.
ERIN: Alright, so we are going to start taking some of
your questions.
Continue to send them in.
We're going to be taking them here and also after the show is
over we'll be answering them in the comments section below.
Let's see what we've got here.
So Tia from Twitter asks: how do you deal with damages made by
impacts from space objects on Hubble?
That's an interesting one, do you want to take that one Jim?
JIM: Sure.
It's a great question we actually look for major impacts
so that we can actually turn the telescope to be as small of
surface area as possible so they'll avoid us if we know
one's coming or if it's big enough.
But for the most part it gets hit and so far I think we've
been really lucky in that nothing has hit us that has
caused anything really to break.
We are going to keep our fingers crossed here for the next
however many years.
ERIN: Long live Hubble.
Alright, so Dan asks: what's the furthest point in lightyears
that Hubble has seen?
I'll leave that to you, Jennifer.
JENNIFER: That's a very good question, so we're trying
to see objects in space farther and farther out, the cameras on
Hubble have improved over the years because of these astronaut
servicing missions we've had more sensitivities.
So right now we're seeing emission in galaxies in the very
distant universe that are in the process of forming more than 13
billion lightyears away.
So we know the universe seems to be about 13.8 billion
years old and we're seeing these baby galaxies form within the
first point eight of these 13.8 billion years in fact within the
first few hundred million years we are seeing these infant
galaxies start to form.
And the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will be able to
see even farther because it has infrared capabilities and will
be able to see even farther back into time as light travels
through this expanding universe and gets stretched into redder
and redder wavelengths of light.
ERIN: Thanks.
Alright, let's see what we've got next.
On that same note, what has Hubble found out about the
beginning of the universe?
JENNIFER: Well, Hubble cannot see all the way back to
the beginning.
There's a time before radiation could even escape for us to see.
But we are able to see pretty close.
Like I said, the first point eight of the 13.8 billion year
history of the universe and what we've learned is that galaxies
formed early on.
Galaxies are collections of stars and gas and dark matter.
Stars formed early on these gravitational collections
of material grew over time and we can now see with Hubble by
looking far out in space, which means looking back in time, that
galaxies were once quite small and and irregular looking and
they merged together many times to grow into the bigger type
galaxies like the Milky Way.
So we've been able to see with Hubble that galaxies began
small, they grew over time, and now we have the privilege of
several generations of stars, massive stars, that come and go
and that gives us heavier elements like carbon and oxygen
things we need for planets and life.
ERIN: Thank you so much.
Unfortunately, I think we're going to have to get out of here
and let these folks get back to work.
But I want to thank you all for joining us and please continue
to send in your questions.
We'll get to some of them in the comments section below.
Take one last look at the room around us before you leave and
if you want to know anything more about Hubble you can always
find on nasa.gov/hubble or NASA Social Media @NASAHubble.
Thank you both so much for being here.
Let's get on out of here.
Thanks, Mike!
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