Still-Troubled Hubble Space Telescope Once Snapped a Red, White, and Blue Image
For three weeks the "payload computer" has been down on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and "Without it, the instruments on board meant to snap pictures and collect data are not currently working," NPR recently reported. But as this weekend approached, NASA made an announcement... NASA confirmed that there is a procedure for turning on the telescope's backup hardware, and that in the coming week it will first test those crucial procedures. (In the past week NASA has "completed preparations" for those tests.) After more than 30 years in space, "the telescope itself and science instruments remain healthy and in a safe configuration," NASA confirmed this week. But while they've now suspended new scientific observations, images already collected by the telescope are still being analyzed, reports Space.com — including one image with all the colors of the American flag released just before the holiday celebrating the country's founding as an independent nation: The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a dazzling view of a distant star cluster, one filled with stars that sparkle in red, white and blue, unveiled just in time for the Fourth of July U.S. holiday. The photo, which NASA and the European Space Agency released July 2, shows the open star cluster NGC 330, a group of stars located about 180,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way, in the constellation Tucana, the Toucan... Astronomers used archived observations from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in 2018 to create this image to support two different studies aimed at understanding how star clusters evolve and how large stars can grow before they explode as supernovas. "The most stunning object in this image is actually the very small star cluster in the lower left corner of the image, surrounded by a nebula of ionised hydrogen (red) and dust (blue)," ESA officials said in a separate image description. " Named Galfor 1, the cluster was discovered in 2018 in Hubble's archival data, which was used to create this latest image from Hubble." And today NASA also tweeted out an image of "the Fireworks Galaxy," the spiral galaxy Caldwell 12 with an unprecedented 10 supernovae observed since 1917.
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