Thursday, September 10, 2009

Guess who's back, bitch?




The Hubble....and it's up in ur galaxiez, lookinz at ur visible light spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared. This is after a repair mission in May that many referred to as NASA's "most dangerous ever". So what is the new and improved Hubble going to do besides flip it's gaze towards earth and peep at you through a window (it can do that)?
it will tackle a whole range of observations. Looking closer to Earth, such observations will include taking a census of the population of Kuiper Belt objects residing at the fringe of our solar system, witnessing the birth of planets around other stars, and probing the composition and structure of the atmospheres of other worlds. Peering much farther away, astronomers have ambitious plans to use Hubble to make the deepest-ever portrait of the universe in near-infrared light. The resulting picture may reveal never-before-seen infant galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 500 million years old. Hubble also is now significantly more well-equipped to probe and further characterize the behavior of dark energy, a mysterious and little-understood repulsive force that is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.
Awesome, I don't know how many e-mails I've had to read through where people bitch about not knowing the population of the Kuiper Belt. Asteroid population and health care, that's all people seem to care about nowadays. Finally I'll have an answer for them: soon, my children, soon.

No comments: