Hubble Telescope Gets Ride on Shuttle Today : Space: Deployment is planned for the second day of the mission. Astronomers expect extraordinarily sharp images from the device.

The Hubble Space Telescope, scheduled for launch at 5:47 a.m. PDT today aboard the space shuttle Discovery, will see dim objects with such clarity that it would be able to take pictures of a firefly in Australia from as far away as New York City, according to program scientist Edward J. Weiler of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

High above the Earth’s atmosphere, the telescope will be free of the distortion that plagues ground-based instruments, and its nearly perfect mirror is expected to produce extraordinarily sharp images.

The telescope is to be gently removed from the Discovery’s cargo bay on the second day of the five-day mission. The Discovery is commanded by Loren Shriver, 45, and all five crew members are veterans of past flights.

The launch today will mark a milestone for hundreds of scientists and engineers who have dedicated a large chunk of their lives to the telescope. Delayed many times because of funding and the Challenger disaster, today is a day some were beginning to fear they might not live long enough to see.

“The veterans in this program are pinching themselves to see if we are really going to fly this thing,” Lennard Fisk, chief scientist for NASA, said Monday. “It’s true. We’re going to fly.”

However, there was some concern over the weather here because of gusting winds that could violate launch restrictions. Officials were hoping that an unusually long launch window of 2 1/2 hours would enable them to wait out any unfavorable weather. The Discovery will have to fly higher than any shuttle has ever flown before to put the telescope in orbit 380 miles above the Earth. Scientists want the telescope to be that high to reduce drag on the instrument caused by even the thinnest atmosphere.

What sets the Hubble apart from ground-based telescopes is that it will see objects billions of light years away with up to 10 times the sharpness of ground-based telescopes. That has led many to believe that the space telescope will see 10 times farther, which simply is not true. But objects that now are too fuzzy to be understood will be up to 10 times clearer, so the effectiveness of the instrument is, in a sense, 10 times stronger.

That sharpness, or “resolution” as astronomers call it, will be one of the telescope’s most useful features because it will help scientists piece together the evolution of the universe.

Astronomers have long been mystified over why the universe, which presumably began as a uniform mass of subatomic particles, should now consist of a veritable zoo of different objects. If the universe began in uniformity, why, for example, are there communities of stars, called galaxies, that differ so much? Why shouldn’t all galaxies be the same?

“Galaxies are the single largest building blocks in the universe, with hundreds of billions of stars,” NASA’s Weiler said during a recent interview. “We know what kind of galaxies there are. But how did they get that way?”

That is one of many questions the Hubble will be asked to address, but the great telescope has its limits. True, the $2-billion instrument will usher in a new era in astronomy, but the search for answers will outlive the Hubble.

More than seven years behind schedule, the launch of the Hubble has been awaited with such eagerness that myths now surround it. It will not, as is often said, be able to see back “to the beginning of time.” Nor will it tell us how the universe began.

“The process of learning how the universe was built will go on as long as people are able to add little pieces,” said James Westphal of Caltech, the principal scientist on the Hubble’s wide-field camera. “We move ahead in fits and starts, and we slip back a little here and there. Not in our lifetime will we really know how this (universe) came to be and where it is going to go.”

The Hubble will not answer those questions, Westphal said, “but it sure is fun making these little steps.”

To be sure, the Hubble is more than a little step because it will see objects so far away that they were created when the universe was only about 500 million years old. That is not the “beginning of time,” but it is a little farther than any other telescope has seen before.

NASA has insisted that no photographs from the telescope will be released for at least two weeks so that they can be electronically enhanced. However, Fisk said Monday that reporters covering the launch would be able to see the first images from the telescope in “raw form.”

To the untrained eye, that may not be all that exciting, but to astronomers used to seeing images from ground-based telescopes, even the first photos should be quite exceptional. They will show a cluster of stars and starlike objects in crystal clarity that appear as fuzzy balls in images from ground-based telescopes.

The best ground-based telescopes can photograph galaxies that are up to about 1 billion light years away, Weiler said, so they are 1 billion years younger because it has taken that long for the light we see today to reach the Earth. Thus scientists are really only able to study galaxies that are up to 1 billion years younger than our own Milky Way.

Weiler compared the problem to trying to understand human evolution “by only looking at 65 to 70 year olds. We’re not looking at any kids.”

The Hubble, with its dramatic improvement in resolution, should show scientists what galaxies looked like when they were “kids” several billion years ago. That, in turn, should finally answer the question of how galaxies evolved into the many forms seen today.

Many scientists believe that the evolution of the universe could be the most important contribution that the Hubble will make, but just about everyone expects it to produce some surprises.

Some of the most mysterious objects in the universe are virtually beyond human imagination, starlike objects called quasars that shine with the brilliance of a billion stars, and spinning beacons of energy called pulsars.

“No human ever conceived of a quasar, or a pulsar,” Weiler said. “These things are brand new, things that were discovered when we increased our instrumental capability.”

Even the astronomer who runs the Space Telescope Science Institute isn’t sure what to expect. But Ricardo Giacconi believes the telescope will reveal that the universe can be “rationally apprehended.”

Even people who have never cared about astronomy should find that prospect exciting, and it should enhance the image of the astronomer in the world today, Giacconi said.

The space telescope, he said, will show that “We’re not all nerds.”

“It’s OK to be an astronomer,” he added.