Shuttle Blasts Off on Stargazing Mission : Space: After years of delay, Columbia carries an observatory into orbit. The telescopes should reveal a universe the eye can’t see.
The space shuttle Columbia lifted off and lit up the night sky over central Florida early today, ending months of frustration for NASA.
Four past efforts to launch the spacecraft had to be scrubbed, but the fifth proved to be the charm for the space agency, sending seven astronauts into space to explore some of the most violent events in the universe.
If successful, the mission will put astronomers above the atmosphere that shields the Earth from the ultraviolet and X-ray radiation of space. Two astronomers--the first civilians to fly since the Challenger explosion--will operate three ultraviolet telescopes aboard Columbia. An X-ray telescope aboard the spacecraft will be operated remotely from the ground.
The four telescopes are part of the Astro observatory, designed to probe the universe in ways not possible from Earth.
Astro will give scientists some of their first images of events as revealed through the emission of ultraviolet light and X-rays.
Almost all astronomical events emit radiation, but only part of that radiation is light that can be seen by the human eye. Thus, the human view of the universe is a distorted one because we see only events that are revealed through light that the eyes can accept.
Scientific instruments can “photograph” celestial targets at all radiation wavelengths, revealing events that human eyes cannot see. But many wavelengths, including ultraviolet light and X-rays, are absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere.
The only way to study the universe at certain wavelengths is to put the instruments above the atmosphere.
Ultraviolet light and X-rays are emitted by the hottest and most violent objects in the universe, those with temperatures between 50,000 degrees and 10 million degrees Fahrenheit--many times hotter than the surface of the sun.
Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched from a space shuttle earlier this year, the Astro observatory will remain in Columbia’s cargo bay and return to Earth at the end of the 10-day mission.
“We are expecting many important discoveries,” said Lennard Fisk, chief scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Although the sky appears calm when viewed from the surface of the Earth, Fisk said it is actually “very violent, with many cataclysmic events.” That includes exploding stars and brilliant objects such as quasars, which are about the size of the solar system but shine more brightly than entire galaxies.
Because the telescopes are mounted in Columbia’s open cargo bay, astronaut John M. (Mike) Lounge, 43, and pilot Guy S. Gardner, 42, will reposition the shuttle about 240 times so that the instruments will be pointed in the right direction. Civilian astronomers Ronald A. Parise, 39, and Samuel T. Durrance, 46, will work 12-hour shifts to operate the telescopes.
Meanwhile, astronauts Robert A. R. Parker, 53, and Jeffrey A. Hoffman, 45, both of whom are also astronomers, will operate the system that fine-tunes the pointing of the telescopes.
Overseeing it all will be mission commander Vance D. Brand, 59, the oldest American to fly in space. He is a veteran of two previous shuttle missions as well as the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous.
Because of the many delays in launching Astro, scientists have had to continually redesign the mission. Some earlier targets have moved out of range, but scientists have had no problem coming up with new phenomena to study.
The newest item on the list is a bizarre object called a “blazar,” which is really a quasar that violently varies in brightness, said Arthur Davidsen, chief scientist for the Johns Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope, one of three such telescopes aboard Columbia.
“We think this is the most luminous thing in the universe right now,” Davidsen said.
He said blazars occasionally explode in brightness, sometimes blazing 100 times brighter than they were before. The blazar that Astro will focus on was only recently discovered.
“It’s extraordinarily lucky that this one is available to us,” he said.
The blazar is tantalizing because its sudden flare-up may have been caused by a black hole that is pulling in matter at an enormous rate. Davidsen said the blazar emits most of its energy in ultraviolet light, making it an ideal target for Astro.
“We believe most of that emission comes from a whirlpool of matter being sucked into a massive black hole,” Davidsen said.
In theory, a black hole is an object that has such a powerful gravitational field that even light cannot escape. Many scientists believe black holes exist, but no one has been able to prove it.
It will take about 24 hours to check and put all the instruments aboard Columbia into operation, so scientists will remain a little nervous for the first day of the mission. If everything works as planned, it will be the first time that all has gone well for Astro.
The mission was originally scheduled for March 6, 1986, but the Challenger explosion on Jan. 28 of that year grounded all space shuttles. When the flight was finally rescheduled, four launch attempts had to be scrubbed--three because of fuel leaks and one because of a communications problem.
Only a handful of the scientists who worked for years on the project were able to make it back to Florida for the fifth attempt to launch the mission.
