What caused this outburst of V838 Mon? For reasons unknown,
star V838 Mon suddenly became one of the brightest stars in
the entire Milky Way Galaxy. Then, just a few months later,
it faded. A stellar flash like this has never been seen
before -- supernovas and novas expel a tremendous amount of
matter out into space. Although the V838 Mon flash appeared
to expel some material into space, what is seen in the above
eight-frame movie, interpolated for smoothness, is actually
an outwardly moving light echo of the flash.
History: How Hubble Came About
http://www.spacetelescope.org/about/history/
The precision-ground mirror was finished in 1981 and the
assembly of the entire spacecraft was completed in 1985. The
plan called for a launch on NASA's Space Shuttle in 1986,
but just months before, the scheduled launch the Challenger
disaster caused a year long delay of the entire Shuttle
programme. Hubble was finally launched in 1990 and the
tension built up as astronomers examined the first images
through Hubble's eyes.
As in all good adventures, success does not come easily: it
did not take long to realise that Hubble's mirror had a
serious flaw. A focusing defect prevented Hubble from taking
sharp images -- the mirror edge was too flat by a mere
fiftieth of the width of a human hair. Over the next months
scientists and engineers from NASA and ESA worked together
and came up with a superb corrective optics package that
would restore Hubble's eyesight completely.
A crew of astronauts carried out the repairs necessary to
restore the telescope to its intended level of performance
during the first Hubble Servicing Mission (SM1) in December
1993. Although the four subsequent servicing missions were
at least as demanding in terms of complexity and work load,
SM1 captured the attention of both astronomers and the
public at large to a degree that no other Shuttle mission
since has achieved. Meticulously planned and brilliantly
executed, the mission succeeded on all counts. It will go
down in history as one of the highlights of human
spaceflight. Hubble was back in business.
Servicing Mission 1 (Dec. 1993)
http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/servicing_missions.php#sm1
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1994/01/
http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/image.php?image=sm1-wfpc1
Servicing Mission 2 (Feb. 1997)
http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/servicing_missions.php#sm2
http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/nuts_.and._bolts/instruments/stis/
Servicing Mission 3A (Dec. 1999)
http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/servicing_missions.php#sm3a
Servicing Mission 3B (Mar. 2002)
http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/servicing_missions.php#sm3b
Servicing Mission 4 (May 2009)
http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/servicing_missions.php#sm4
Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html
sam.wormley@gmail.com