Hubble Space Telescope's Sixteenth Anniversary

An anonymous reader writes "This week marks the sixteenth anniversary of the launch of Hubble Space Telescope. 'To celebrate [...] NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), are releasing this image of the magnificent starburst galaxy, Messier 82 (M82). This mosaic image is the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82. The galaxy is remarkable for its bright blue disk, webs of shredded clouds, and fiery-looking plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out of its central regions.' Wired News also has some nice additional images."

Re:What kind of pisses me off...

[helioquake]

I dunno.

If I were the guy who built the original primary mirror, I wouldn't want the world to know...

There's a REALLY good book waiting to be written

[bobcardone]

About the concept, design, development, engineering, construction, deployment, repair and usage of this wonderful device.
Let's hope it takes a while before the last chapter is written...

Re:What kind of pisses me off...

[helioquake]

I went for funny and I got "insightful"...

Man, I suck at funny.

Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[UOZaphod]

I really don't see a contradiction. Presupposing the creation of earth by an omnipotent God, I would be more suprised if there *weren't* similar acts of creation all over the universe. If you read popular fiction nowadays though, the prevailing attitude is that an alien landing on earth would somehow "shut up" all the theists. I doubt it would.

Hubble Reentry skid ?!

[bzdang]

Check out this photo of parts for a Hubble Telescope Reentry Skid at http://cstcomposites.com/images/NASA.JPG [cstcomposites.com] . No doubt a brainchild of those greedy scheming curators at the Smithsonian. Sending it into the sun would be cool too, but pushing it into the ocean would be cheapest.

Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I love that picture -- it's one of my desktops -- but it doesn't make me feel insignificant at all. It makes me feel pretty damn proud to be a member of the species that can not only see things like that, but make at least a good attempt at understanding them.

Re:Hubble Ultra Deep Field

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember seeing the Deep Field images right after they were released. After seeing them, I walked around for weeks with the lingering sense of how enormous, magnificent, and beautiful our universe truly is; a deeply humbling experience. Our galaxy, an ordinary spiral galaxy, is home to approximately 200 million stars. There are billions of galaxies. The universe itself is about 14 billion years old, and many cosmologists argue that it is at least 100 billion light years across. These numbers may seem hard to fathom, but I think everyone should ponder these things at least once in their lives. They may begin to see their own lives and the world around them from a new, and perhaps more enlightened perspective.

Re:What kind of pisses me off...

[helioquake]

Haha, FUNNY, guys and gals.

last anniversary?

[peter303]

The Hubble will probably die by 2010 when too many gyros fail or it sinks too low in the atmosphere. There is a shuttle missile repair kit in mothballs. NASA lacks mission time to do this if it only do oneor two launches a year. Plus the Hubble orbit is too out of sync with the International Space Station to be safe. Should the shuttle get into trouble, it lacks the capacity to change between the two orbits.