Jan 7 2003
From The Space Library
NASA announced that the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard the HST had used “a natural 'zoom lens' in space to boost its view of the distant universe,” revealing remote galaxies previously beyond HST's reach. For more than 13 hours, the camera had concentrated on one of the most massive known galaxy clusters, Abell 1689, located more than 2.2 billion light-years away. In combination with dark matter, Abell 1689's gravity behaves as a 2 million light-year- wide lens in space, bending and magnifying the light of the galaxies behind it. The HST image captured hundreds of galaxies~ 10 times more arcs than a ground-based telescope could reveal~ “smeared by the gravitational bending of light into a spider-web tracing of blue and red arcs of light.” Scientists intended to use the image map to study the distribution of dark matter in galaxy clusters and to trace the history of star formation in the universe over the past 13 billion years. NASA deemed the image “an exquisite demonstration of Albert Einstein's prediction that gravity warps space and therefore distorts a beam of light.(NASA, “Biggest 'Zoom Lens' in Space Extends Hubble's Reach,” news release 03-003, 7 January 2003, ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/pressrel/2003/03-003.txt (accessed 9 July 2008).
GenCorp Inc.'s company Aerojet, a member of the Rocket Based Combined Cycle Consortium (RBC3), announced that NASA and RBC3 had successfully completed the first in a series of tests of a full-scale rocket thrust. Conducted at Aerojet facilities in Sacramento, California, the test demonstrated the first successful hot fire of a thruster using a mix of decomposed peroxide, liquid peroxide, and JP-7 jet fuel to generate combustion~a key milestone in NASA's Integrated System Test of an Air-breathing Rocket (ISTAR) program. The ISTAR program sought to flight-test a self-powered hypersonic flight vehicle at more than six times the speed of sound by the end of the decade. The program was part of NASA's effort to develop hypersonic technologies by 2025, to create flight vehicles that could provide safe, routine, and affordable space access and air transportation to anywhere on the globe in less than 2 hours. (Aerojet, “NASA, Industry Consortium Successfully Test Full-Scale Hypersonic Engine Thruster,” news release, 7 January 2003, http://www.aerojet.com/program/news/nr_010703_nasa_industry_consortium_ successfully_tests _thruster.htm ?program_ID=45 (accessed 30 July 2008); “NASA, “NASA Tests Environmentally Friendly Rocket Fuel,” news release 03-010, 13 January 2003, ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/pressrel/2003/03-010.txt (accessed 9 July 2008).
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