What Is The Name Of The Camera On The Hubble Space Telescope

TELESCOPE QUICK FACTS

There are no natural color cameras aboard Hubble and there never have been. The optical cameras on board have all been digital CCD cameras, which take images as grayscale pixels just use colored filters to isolate different colors in each prototype.

Sometimes the colour in the images is as natural every bit possible. Nevertheless, the color given to the images is not just artistic embellishment. The images are, indeed, downloaded every bit black and white, and color is added for a number of different reasons — for example, to evidence the location of chemical elements and highlight features then subdued that the human eye cannot come across them.

For more information, read the Meaning of Color, which explains in particular how color is added to images.

No, Hubble cannot accept photos of the Apollo landing sites. An object on the Moon, even the size of a large house, is too small to resolve. So, annihilation nosotros left on the Moon cannot exist resolved in whatever Hubble image. It would simply appear equally a dot composite with its surround.

Here is a movie that Hubble took of the Moon.

The surface of the Earth is whizzing by as Hubble orbits, and the pointing organisation, designed to track the afar stars, cannot runway an object on the Earth. The shortest exposure fourth dimension on any of the Hubble instruments is 0.1 seconds, and in this time Hubble moves almost half a mile, nigh 700 meters. A pic Hubble took of World would be completely streaked.

While there is no "existent time" camera or webcam on board the telescope for alive relay links, you can detect out what Hubble is observing at any time past visiting Infinite Telescope Live. Usually, Hubble is looking at these targets for the first time, so the images you lot volition run across there are from other telescopes, just give yous an idea of where Hubble is looking.

The images that Hubble takes are digital pictures and spectra that are more often than not released to the public after six months (to allow the investigators time to do their research). The data, which are transmitted from the telescope in digital form, need to be converted from this digitized information by computers into black-and-white photos. These are then enhanced to discern details in the images.

Learn more about how the telescope and its instruments operate and its instruments.

The strange, stair-shaped images come up from the Wide Field and Planetary Photographic camera 2 (WFPC2), removed from Hubble in 2009. WFPC2 consisted of four cameras, each of which took a picture of a section of the target. It'southward like taking four pictures of a unmarried scene, and so putting them together to create the whole picture show.

Just ane of WFPC2'south cameras took a magnified view of the department it's observing, to allow the states to study that section in finer item. When the images are processed, that magnified section is shrunk downward to the same calibration as the other sections, so that information technology fits into the image.

The Hubble Space Telescope was named after astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble (1889–1953), who made some of the most important discoveries in modern astronomy. In the 1920s, making use of relationships established by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Dr. Hubble showed that some of the numerous afar, faint clouds of lite in the universe were actually entire galaxies — much like our own Milky Way. The realization that the Milky Style is only i of many galaxies forever changed the way humanity views our identify in the universe. But perhaps his greatest discovery came in 1929, when Hubble determined that the further a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it appears to move abroad. This notion of an expanding universe formed the ground of the big blindside theory, which states that the universe began with an intense burst of energy at a single moment in time and has been expanding ever since.

Hubble was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery (STS-31) on Apr 24, 1990. It was deployed into orbit the following day, April 25, 1990.

Hubble orbits the Globe at an altitude of about 340 miles (547 kilometers), inclined 28.5 degrees to the equator. This vantage betoken is higher up the negative effects of Earth's atmosphere. Traveling at a speed of about 17,000 miles per hr (27,300 kilometers per 60 minutes), Hubble takes nigh 95 minutes to consummate one orbit around Globe.

Shifting pockets of air in Globe'south atmosphere misconstrue light from space — that's why stars seem to twinkle when viewed from the ground. The atmosphere likewise blocks some wavelengths of light partially or entirely, particularly ultraviolet calorie-free. This makes space the only place where a telescope can get a truly articulate and comprehensive view of the universe. Although Hubble also sees visible and infrared light, it is the telescope's capability in the ultraviolet that volition not exist matched or replaced in the near hereafter.

Hubble is a Cassegrain telescope — a type of reflecting telescope. Lite enters the telescope and strikes the large primary, or main, mirror. The light is then reflected from the master mirror onto the secondary mirror, which then focuses the light back through a hole in the primary mirror to a point behind that mirror, where the science instruments are located. Hubble'south primary mirror is 94.5 inches (2.4 meters) in diameter.

Hubble collects low-cal from celestial objects and directs it to the telescope's science instruments. Hubble'southward current suite of instruments includes the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), and Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS).

These are not the simply instruments that accept flown aboard Hubble. The telescope was designed to be visited periodically by astronauts, who brought new instruments and engineering science, and fabricated repairs, from December 1993 to May 2009.

Hubble was serviced on-orbit 5 times past astronauts aboard the infinite shuttle. They rendezvoused with the telescope and placed it in the shuttle's payload bay to complete the servicing. Below are the names and dates of the servicing missions:

Servicing Mission i (STS-61): December 1993
Servicing Mission 2 (STS-82): Feb 1997
Servicing Mission 3A (STS-103): December 1999
Servicing Mission 3B (STS-109): March 2002
Servicing Mission 4 (STS-125): May 2009

Learn more than about Hubble's servicing missions.

Hubble is more scientifically productive today than at any time in its past, and NASA plans to operate Hubble at least well into this new decade. Hubble's longevity is partly due to its multiple servicing missions, the last one existence in 2009. That is when astronauts installed a new device, the Soft Capture Mechanism, to allow a robotic spacecraft to attach itself to Hubble someday, once the telescope is at the end of its life, and guide its descent to Earth or boost it to a higher orbit.