PROBABLY THE GREATEST TV. SHOW EVER. Mike Altman, Father of the original films director, wrote the lyrics to this song when he was 14 years old. Johhny Mandell wrote the music.
MOSCOW. ---- A monument to the ENEMA has been unveiled at a spa in the southern Russian city of Zheleznovodsk.
The bronze syringe bulb, which weighs 800 pounds and is held by three angels, was unveiled at the Mashuk-Akva Term spa, the spa's director said Thursday.
THE AMAZING TELESCOPE, SCHEDULED FOR ITS FINAL REPAIR MISSION, HAS CHANGED WHAT WE KNOW OF THE UNIVERSE.
The Hubble Space Telescope, the most productive scientific instrument of all time, is slated for itr fifth and final repair mission later this year. The space shuttle astronauts will launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, match orbits with the telescope, capture it, service it, upgrade it, and replace its broken parts, on the spot.
Roughly the size of a Greyhound bus, Hubble was launched aboard the space shuttle DISCOVERY in 1990 and already has outlived its 15 year life expectancy. This new servicing mission will extend Hubble's life several more years. It also will replace burned out circuit boards to the Advanced Camera for Surveys. That's the instrument responsible for Hubble's most memorable images since it was installed in 2002.
Servicing Hubble is a task that requires exquisite dexterity. We normally think of astronauts as brave and noble. But, in this case, having the " right stuff " includes being a hardware surgeon extraordinaire.
Perhaps you didn't know, but Hubble is not alone up there. About two dozen space telescopes of assorted sizes and shapes orbit the Earth and the Sun. Each of them provides a clear view of the cosmos that is unobstructed, unblemished, and undiminished by Earth's turbulent and murky atmosphere. But most of these telescopes were launched with no means of servicing them. Parts wear out. Gyroscopes fail. Batteries die. These hardware realities limit a telescopes life expectancy to anywhere from three to seven years.
Entire classes of objects and phenomena in the cosmos reveal themselves only through one or more of these invisible cosmic windows. Black holes, for example, were discovered by their X-ray calling card, radiation that was generated by the surrounding, swirling gas just before it descended into the abyss.
Hubble, on the other hand, is the first and only space telescope to observe the universe using primarily visible light. Hubble's scientific legacy is unimpeachable. Among Hubble's highlights is setling the decades old debate about the age of the universe. Previously, the data were so bad that astrophysicists could not agree. Some thought 10 billion years. Others, 20 billion. But Hubble enabled us to measure accurately how the brightness varies in a particular type of star that resides in a distant cluster of galaxies. That information, when plugged into a simple formula, tells us their distance from Earth. And because the entire universe is expanding at a known rate, we can then turn back the clock to determine how long ago everything was in the same place. The answer? The universe was born 14 billion years ago.
The Hubble has yielded an unprecedented scientific legacy. Among its top achievements:
* It allowed us to accurately measure the age of the universe.
* It confirmed that every large galaxy has at its center a massive black hole.
* It was key to the discovery of the role of " dark energy " in the expanding universe.
Of course, nothing lasts forever, except perhaps, the universe itself. So Hubble eventually will die. But in the meantime, NASA is building the James Webb Space Telescope, specially designed to see deeper into the universe than Hubble ever could. Meanwhile, NASA plans to retire the aging space shuttle by 2010.
This step will enable its aerospace engineers, assembly lines, and funding streams to focus on a new suite of launch vehicles that will do what the shuttles are not designed to do, return us to the Moon and take us on to Mars and beyond.
The march of discovery continues, driven by our timeless and collective urge to explore.
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