Description
Author: Dr David Bakr, ISBN: 9780857337979, Hardcover, Published in 2016
An insight into the history, development, collaboration, construction and role of the Earth-orbiting space telescope.
One hundred years ago, Edwin P Hubble worked at the Yerkes Observatory, Wisconsin, researching nebulae and & faint objects. A few years later, after the 1914-18 war, he returned from the front lines in battle-torn France to continue his passion for astronomy. He committed himself to work which would prove conclusively that the Milky Way was not the only cluster of stars in the Universe, but that some of the clusters appearing to be in our own galaxy were island clusters in their own right, far beyond the outer edge of the Milky Way.
Hubble's pioneering work led quickly to a realisation that space itself was populated with billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Coupled to the groundbreaking work of Albert Einstein in linking space and time, Hubble's work launched a new age of astronomy and astrophysics. A few decades later, the Space Age was born and the opportunity emerged to place a telescope in space, free of the disturbance caused by looking through Earth's dense atmosphere.
This manual provides a unique insight into the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) - aptly named for one of the greatest names in astronomy - and the five visits made by teams of astronauts aboard the Shuttle to correct an imperfection in the HST's primary mirror, to carry out repairs and upgrades to its operating systems, and to replace ageing science instruments with new and improved devices capable of seeing farther and with greater clarity objects hardly observed when the Telescope was launched aboard the Shuttle in 1990.
Here is the detailed story of how the Telescope was designed and built, how ft operates, what it can do and how it does it. Wth clear diagrams, cutaway drawings and charts to display the characteristics of each science instrument, plus a wealth of photographs depicting the construction and servicing of the Telescope, the engaging text builds a picture of a remarkable spacecraft, continually adapted, improved and upgraded to provide scientists on Earth with one of the most powerful tools in modem astronomy.
