May 12 1997
From The Space Library
Hubble scientists released their first reviews of the newly upgraded HST, concluding enthusiastically that the refurbished space telescope offered exciting new possibilities. The upgrades to the HST significantly improved the range and precision of the instrument. Scientists reported peering approximately 50 million light-years away and zeroing in on previously undetectable black holes. According to Edward J. Weiler, the head of NASA's Hubble team, the added Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, installed in February 1997, reduced the length of time it took to confirm the presence of black holes in the universe. Weiler called the HST a "census bureau" for black-hole hunting, allowing researchers to survey these objects as a population rather than as individual phenomena. Another new instrument installed in February, the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), enabled the HST to capture near-infrared wavelengths, beginning to penetrate the "dusty veil" that had prevented astronomers from studying the birth and death of stars. NASA engineers also disclosed that an early focusing problem with one of the three cameras used by the NICMOS system seemed to be correcting itself. Although the flaw could limit the life of the system, scientists were confident that NICMOS would still be able to gather and preserve all scientific data. During early testing of the NICMOS system, scientists had uncovered a region of the universe in which young stars eject material into a molecular cloud, a process that researchers had long hypothesized but had been unable to observe.
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