| The Hubble Space Telescope |
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The Hubble Space Telescope is located at the outer edges of the atmosphere, in a circular orbit around the Earth around at 593 kilometers above sea level it takes to travel between 96 and 97 minutes. It was launched into orbit on 24 April 1990 as a joint project of NASA and ESA. The telescope can obtain optical resolutions greater than 0, the second of arc. Weighs around 11,000 kilos, is cylindrical in shape and has a length of 13.2 m and a maximum diameter of 4.2 meters.  The telescope is a reflector and has two mirrors, with the main 2, 4 meters in diameter. For exploring the sky incorporates several spectrometers and three cameras, a narrow field to photograph small areas of land (because of its remoteness weak brightness), a wide field to produce images of planets and third infrared. By two solar panels generate electricity that feeds the cameras, the four engines used to orient and stabilize the telescope and cooling equipment infrared camera and spectrometer working at -180 ° C. Since its launch, the telescope has received several visits from astronauts to correct errors of operation and install additional equipment. Due to friction with the atmosphere (very thin at that height), the telescope is losing weight slowly, gaining speed, so that each time it is visited, the space shuttle has to push to a slightly higher orbit. The advantage of having a telescope above the atmosphere lies mainly in that it absorbs certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation incident on Earth, especially in the infrared which obscures the images obtained, lowering the quality and limiting the scope or resolution, ground-based telescopes. Furthermore, they are also affected by meteorological factors (presence of clouds) and light pollution caused by large urban settlements, which reduces the potential for location of ground-based telescopes. Since it was launched into orbit in 1990 to avoid the distortion of the atmosphere - historically, the problem of all ground-based telescopes - the Hubble has enabled scientists to see the universe with a clarity never achieved. With its observations, astronomers confirmed the existence of black holes, clarified ideas about the birth of the universe in a huge explosion, the Big Bang, which occurred for about 13,700 million years, and revealed new galaxies and systems in the far corners of the cosmos. Hubble also helped scientists to establish that the solar system is much younger than the universe. At first thought to bring the telescope back to Earth every five years for maintenance, and also would be a peacekeeping mission in space in each period. Later, seeing the complications and risks involved return the instrument to Earth and re-launch it, it was decided that there would be a peacekeeping mission in space three years, being the first one scheduled for December 1993. When shortly after being released, it was discovered that Hubble was suffering from an aberration due to an error of construction, officials began counting the days for the first servicing mission, with the hope that the error could be corrected optics. Since that first mission in keeping a system was installed to correct the telescope optics, sacrificing for this instrument (the fast photometer), Hubble has proven to be an instrument without equal, capable of continuously impacting comments our ideas about the Universe. Hubble provided dramatic images of the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994 as well as evidence of the existence of planets orbiting other stars. Some comments that have led to the current model of the expanding universe obtained with this telescope. The theory that most galaxies host a black hole at its core has been partially confirmed by numerous observations. In December 1995, the telescope photographed the Hubble Deep Field, a region the size of one thirty-millionth part of the area of sky that contains several thousand galaxies. A similar image of the southern hemisphere was taken in 1998 to appreciate significant similarities between the two, which has reinforced the principle that posits that the structure of the universe is independent of the direction in which we look.
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3.20 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved." |
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