Tag Archive for 'Hubble Space Telescope'

Shuttle Mission Delayed as Hubble Malfunctions

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Doug
on September 29, 2008
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NASA PRESS RELEASE
29 September 2008

WASHINGTON — NASA will host a media teleconference at 6 p.m. EDT today to discuss a significant Hubble Space Telescope anomaly that occurred this weekend affecting the storage and transmittal of science data to Earth. Fixing the problem will delay next month’s space shuttle Atlantis’ Hubble servicing mission.

The malfunctioning system is Hubble’s Control Unit/Science Data Formatter - Side A. Shortly after 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 27, the telescope’s spacecraft computer issued commands to safe the payload computer and science instruments when errors were detected within the Science Data Formatter. An attempt to reset the formatter and obtain a dump of the payload computer’s memory was unsuccessful.

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Hubble Space Telescope Detects First-Ever Organic Molecule on Extra-Solar Planet

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Doug
on March 19, 2008
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NASA PRESS RELEASE

A team of astronomers led by Mark Swain of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has made the first detection ever of an organic molecule in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting another star. The breakthrough, made with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, is an important step in eventually identifying signs of life on a planet outside our solar system.

The molecule found by Hubble is methane, which under the right circumstances can play a key role in prebiotic chemistry - the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life as we know it.

This discovery proves that Hubble and upcoming space missions, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, can detect organic molecules on planets around other stars by using spectroscopy, which splits light into its components to reveal the “fingerprints” of various chemicals.

“This is a crucial stepping stone to eventually characterizing prebiotic molecules on planets where life could exist,” said Swain, lead author of a paper appearing in the March 20 issue of Nature.

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