Archive for the ‘Space Missions’ Category

NASA – Yuri Gagarin: First Man in Space

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Source – : NASA – Yuri Gagarin: First Man in Space.

April 12 was already a huge day in space history twenty years before the launch of the first shuttle mission. On that day in 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (left, on the way to the launch pad) became the first human in space, making a 108-minute orbital flight in his Vostok 1 spacecraft. Newspapers like The Huntsville Times (right) trumpeted Gagarin’s accomplishment.

Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space less than a month later.

The first cooperative human space flight project between the United States and the Soviet Union took place in 1975. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was designed to test the compatibility of rendezvous and docking systems for American and Soviet spacecraft and to open the way for future joint manned flights.

Since 1993, the U.S. and Russia have worked together on a number of other space flight projects. The Space Shuttle began visiting the Russian Mir space station in 1994, and in 1995 Norm Thagard became the first U.S. astronaut to take up residency on Mir. Seven U.S. astronauts served with their Russian counterparts aboard the orbiting Mir laboratory from 1995 to 1998. The experience gained from the Mir cooperative effort, as well as lessons learned, paved the way for the International Space Station.

In-orbit construction on the Station began in November 1998, and it has been staffed non-stop with international crews since November 2000. The first Station crew, made up of U.S. commander Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, was launched on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The crew returned to Earth on the Space Shuttle Discovery in March 2001.

The MESSENGER probe enters orbit around the innermost planet on March 17th

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

Source – NASA: NASA Science News for March 15, 2011

It’s not easy to visit Mercury, but NASA is about to settle in for a long stay. The MESSENGER probe enters orbit around the innermost planet on March 17th.

What’s Up for March? Solar & Mercury views!

Saturday, March 5th, 2011

What’s Up for March 2011?.

This month, the Messenger spacecraft gets into orbit around Mercury on the 18th, and you can see the swift planet in the evening skies,too! Meanwhile, celebrate Sun-Earth day on the 19th, and view the sun through solar safe telescopes.

Can WISE Find the Hypothetical ‘Tyche’?

Saturday, February 19th, 2011

Source – JPL/NASA: Earth-Size Planet Candidates Found in Habitable Zone

02.18.11

In November 2010, the scientific journal Icarus published a paper by astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, who proposed the existence of a binary companion to our sun, larger than Jupiter, in the long-hypothesized “Oort cloud” — a faraway repository of small icy bodies at the edge of our solar system. The researchers use the name “Tyche” for the hypothetical planet. Their paper argues that evidence for the planet would have been recorded by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

WISE is a NASA mission, launched in December 2009, which scanned the entire celestial sky at four infrared wavelengths about 1.5 times. It captured more than 2.7 million images of objects in space, ranging from faraway galaxies to asteroids and comets relatively close to Earth. Recently, WISE completed an extended mission, allowing it to finish a complete scan of the asteroid belt, and two complete scans of the more distant universe, in two infrared bands. So far, the mission’s discoveries of previously unknown objects include an ultra-cold star or brown dwarf, 20 comets, 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs), and more than 33,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Following its successful survey, WISE was put into hibernation in February 2011. Analysis of WISE data continues. A preliminary public release of the first 14 weeks of data is planned for April 2011, and the final release of the full survey is planned for March 2012.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: When could data from WISE confirm or rule out the existence of the hypothesized planet Tyche?

A: It is too early to know whether WISE data confirms or rules out a large object in the Oort cloud. Analysis over the next couple of years will be needed to determine if WISE has actually detected such a world or not. The first 14 weeks of data, being released in April 2011, are unlikely to be sufficient. The full survey, scheduled for release in March 2012, should provide greater insight. Once the WISE data are fully processed, released and analyzed, the Tyche hypothesis that Matese and Whitmire propose will be tested.

Q: Is it a certainty that WISE would have observed such a planet if it exists?

A: It is likely but not a foregone conclusion that WISE could confirm whether or not Tyche exists. Since WISE surveyed the whole sky once, then covered the entire sky again in two of its infrared bands six months later, WISE would see a change in the apparent position of a large planet body in the Oort cloud over the six-month period. The two bands used in the second sky coverage were designed to identify very small, cold stars (or brown dwarfs) — which are much like planets larger than Jupiter, as Tyche is hypothesized to be.

Q: If Tyche does exist, why would it have taken so long to find another planet in our solar system?

A: Tyche would be too cold and faint for a visible light telescope to identify. Sensitive infrared telescopes could pick up the glow from such an object, if they looked in the right direction. WISE is a sensitive infrared telescope that looks in all directions.

Q: Why is the hypothesized object dubbed “Tyche,” and why choose a Greek name when the names of other planets derive from Roman mythology?

A: In the 1980s, a different companion to the sun was hypothesized. That object, named for the Greek goddess “Nemesis,” was proposed to explain periodic mass extinctions on the Earth. Nemesis would have followed a highly elliptical orbit, perturbing comets in the Oort Cloud roughly every 26 million years and sending a shower of comets toward the inner solar system. Some of these comets would have slammed into Earth, causing catastrophic results to life. Recent scientific analysis no longer supports the idea that extinctions on Earth happen at regular, repeating intervals. Thus, the Nemesis hypothesis is no longer needed. However, it is still possible that the sun could have a distant, unseen companion in a more circular orbit with a period of a few million years — one that would not cause devastating effects to terrestrial life. To distinguish this object from the malevolent “Nemesis,” astronomers chose the name of Nemesis’s benevolent sister in Greek mythology, “Tyche.”

JPL manages and operates the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA’s Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise .

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

2011

Earth-Size Planet Candidates Found in Habitable Zone

Saturday, February 5th, 2011

Source – JPL/NASA: Earth-Size Planet Candidates Found in Habitable Zone
February 02, 2011

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Five of the potential planets are near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of smaller, cooler stars than our sun.

Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets. Kepler also found six confirmed planets orbiting a sun-like star, Kepler-11. This is the largest group of transiting planets orbiting a single star yet discovered outside our solar system.

“In one generation we have gone from extraterrestrial planets being a mainstay of science fiction, to the present, where Kepler has helped turn science fiction into today’s reality,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “These discoveries underscore the importance of NASA’s science missions, which consistently increase understanding of our place in the cosmos.”

The discoveries are part of several hundred new planet candidates identified in new Kepler mission science data, released on Tuesday, Feb. 1. The findings increase the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to-date to 1,235. Of these, 68 are approximately Earth-size; 288 are super-Earth-size; 662 are Neptune-size; 165 are the size of Jupiter and 19 are larger than Jupiter. Of the 54 new planet candidates found in the habitable zone, five are near Earth-sized. The remaining 49 habitable zone candidates range from super-Earth size — up to twice the size of Earth — to larger than Jupiter.

The findings are based on the results of observations conducted May 12 to Sept. 17, 2009, of more than 156,000 stars in Kepler’s field of view, which covers approximately one four-hundredth of the sky.

“The fact that we’ve found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy,” said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., the mission’s science principal investigator. “We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone, some of which could have moons with liquid water.”

Among the stars with planetary candidates, 170 show evidence of multiple planetary candidates. Kepler-11, located approximately 2,000 light years from Earth, is the most tightly packed planetary system yet discovered. All six of its confirmed planets have orbits smaller than Venus, and five of the six have orbits smaller than Mercury’s. The only other star with more than one confirmed transiting planet is Kepler-9, which has three. The Kepler-11 findings will be published in the Feb. 3 issue of the journal Nature.

“Kepler-11 is a remarkable system whose architecture and dynamics provide clues about its formation,” said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist and Kepler science team member at Ames. “These six planets are mixtures of rock and gases, possibly including water. The rocky material accounts for most of the planets’ mass, while the gas takes up most of their volume. By measuring the sizes and masses of the five inner planets, we determined they are among the lowest-mass confirmed planets beyond our solar system.”

All of the planets orbiting Kepler-11 are larger than Earth, with the largest ones being comparable in size to Uranus and Neptune. The innermost planet, Kepler-11b, is 10 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. Moving outward, the other planets are Kepler-11c, Kepler-11d, Kepler-11e, Kepler-11f, and the outermost planet, Kepler-11g, which is half as far from its star as Earth is from the sun.

The planets Kepler-11d, Kepler-11e and Kepler-11f have a significant amount of light gas, which indicates that they formed within a few million years of the system’s formation.

“The historic milestones Kepler makes with each new discovery will determine the course of every exoplanet mission to follow,” said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Kepler, a space telescope, looks for planet signatures by measuring tiny decreases in the brightness of stars caused by planets crossing in front of them. This is known as a transit. Since transits of planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars occur about once a year and require three transits for verification, it is expected to take three years to locate and verify Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars.

The Kepler science team uses ground-based telescopes and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to review observations on planetary candidates and other objects of interest the spacecraft finds. The star field that Kepler observes in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra can only be seen from ground-based observatories in spring through early fall. The data from these other observations help determine which candidates can be validated as planets.

Ames manages Kepler’s ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes the Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA’s 10th Discovery Mission and is funded by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For more information about the Kepler mission, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/kepler .
More information about NASA’s planet-hunting efforts is online at:
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/ .

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

Trent Perrotto 202-358-0321
Headquarters, Washington
trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov

2011-036

Surprise Hidden in Titan’s Smog: Cirrus-Like Clouds

Saturday, February 5th, 2011

Source – JPL/NASA: Surprise Hidden in Titan’s Smog: Cirrus-Like Clouds

Every day is a bad-air day on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Blanketed by haze far worse than any smog belched out in Los Angeles, Beijing or even Sherlock Holmes’ London, the moon looks like a dirty orange ball. Described once as crude oil without the sulfur, the haze is made of tiny droplets of hydrocarbons with other, more noxious chemicals mixed in. Gunk.

Icky as it may sound, Titan is really the rarest of gems: the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere worthy of a planet. This atmosphere comes complete with lightning, drizzle and occasionally a big, summer-downpour style of cloud made of methane or ethane-hydrocarbons that are best known for their role in natural gas.

Now, thin, wispy clouds of ice particles, similar to Earth’s cirrus clouds, are being reported by Carrie Anderson and Robert Samuelson at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The findings, published this week in the journal Icarus, were made using the composite infrared spectrometer on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

Unlike Titan’s brownish haze, the ice clouds have the pearly white appearance of freshly fallen snow. Their existence is the latest clue to the workings of Titan’s intriguing atmosphere and its one-way “cycle” that delivers hydrocarbons and other organic compounds to the ground as precipitation. Those compounds don’t evaporate to replenish the atmosphere, but somehow the supply has not run out yet.

“This is the first time we have been able to get details about these clouds,” says Samuelson, an emeritus scientist at Goddard and the co-author of the paper. “Previously, we had a lot of information about the gases in Titan’s atmosphere but not much about the [high-altitude] clouds.”

Compared to the puffy methane and ethane clouds found before in a lower part of the atmosphere by both ground-based observers and in images taken by Cassini’s imaging science subsystem and visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, these clouds are much thinner and located higher in the atmosphere. “They are very tenuous and very easy to miss,” says Anderson, the paper’s lead author. “The only earlier hints that they existed were faint glimpses that NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft caught as it flew by Titan in 1980.”

The full story is online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/titan-clouds.html .

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The CIRS team is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where the instrument was built.

Written by Elizabeth Zubritsky/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Media contact: Jia-Rui Cook/Priscilla Vega
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0850/354-1357
jccook@jpl.nasa.gov / Priscilla.r.vega@jpl.nasa.gov

Proposed Mission to Jupiter System Achieves Milestone

Saturday, February 5th, 2011

Source – JPL/NASA: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mobile/news/index.cfm?release=2011-041

With input from scientists around the world, American and European scientists working on the potential next new mission to the Jupiter system have articulated their joint vision for the Europa Jupiter System Mission. The mission is a proposed partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency. The scientists on the joint NASA-ESA definition team agreed that the overarching science theme for the Europa Jupiter System Mission will be “the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants.”

The proposed Europa Jupiter System Mission would provide orbiters around two of Jupiter’s moons: a NASA orbiter around Europa called the Jupiter Europa Orbiter, and an ESA orbiter around Ganymede called the Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter.

“We’ve reached hands across the Atlantic to define a mission to Jupiter’s water worlds,” said Bob Pappalardo, the pre-project scientist for the proposed Jupiter Europa Orbiter, who is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “The Europa Jupiter System Mission will create a leap in scientific knowledge about the moons of Jupiter and their potential to harbor life.”

The new reports integrate goals that were being separately developed by NASA and ESA working groups into one unified strategy.

The ESA report is being presented to the European public and science community this week, and the NASA report was published online in December. The NASA report is available at http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag .

The proposed mission singles out the icy moons Europa and Ganymede as special worlds that can lead to a broader understanding of the Jovian system and of the possibility of life in our solar system and beyond. They are natural laboratories for analyzing the nature, evolution and potential habitability of icy worlds, because they are believed to present two different kinds of sub-surface oceans.

The Jupiter Europa Orbiter would characterize the relatively thin ice shell above Europa’s ocean, the extent of that ocean, the materials composing its internal layers, and the way surface features such as ridges and “freckles” formed. It will also identify candidate sites for potential future landers. Instruments that might be on board could include a laser altimeter, an ice-penetrating radar, spectrometers that can obtain data in visible, infrared and ultraviolet radiation, and cameras with narrow- and wide-angle capabilities. The actual instruments to fly would be selected through a NASA competitive call for proposals.

Ganymede is thought to have a thicker ice shell, with its interior ocean sandwiched between ice above and below. ESA’s Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter would investigate this different kind of internal structure. The Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter would also study the intrinsic magnetic field that makes Ganymede unique among all the solar system’s known moons. This orbiter, whose instruments would also be chosen through a competitive process, could include a laser altimeter, spectrometers and cameras, plus additional fields-and-particles instruments

The two orbiters would also study other large Jovian moons, Io and Callisto, with an eye towards exploring the Jupiter system as an archetype for other gas giant planets.

NASA and ESA officials gave the Europa Jupiter System Mission proposal priority status for continued study in 2009, agreeing that it was the most technically feasible of the outer solar system flagship missions under consideration.

Over the next few months, NASA officials will be analyzing the joint strategy and awaiting the outcome of the next Planetary Science Decadal Survey by the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academies. That survey will serve as a roadmap for new NASA planetary missions for the decade beginning 2013.

For more information about the Europa Jupiter System Mission, go to http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/europajupitersystemmissionejsm/ .

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Jia-Rui C. Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Jccook@jpl.nasa.gov

NASA’s Fermi Telescope Finds Giant Structure in our Galaxy.

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

Source – NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/fermi

Using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, scientists have recently discovered a gigantic, mysterious structure in our galaxy. This feature looks like a pair of bubbles extending above and below our galaxy’s center. Each lobe is 25,000 light-years tall and the whole structure may be only a few million years old. (Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center) For more information about Fermi, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/fermi

Trent Perrotto
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0321
trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov

Lynn Chandler
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-2806
lynn.chandler-1@nasa.gov

NASA EPOXI Flyby Reveals New Insights Into Comet Features

Friday, November 5th, 2010

Comet Hartley 2 by NASA's EPOXI mission

Jets Galore
This enhanced image, one of the closest taken of comet Hartley 2 by NASA’s EPOXI mission, shows jets and where they originate from the surface. There are jets outgassing from the sunward side, the night side, and along the terminator — the line between the two sides.

NASA EPOXI Flyby Reveals New Insights Into Comet Features.

Camera That Saved Hubble to Visit Museum : Denver Museum of Nature & Science

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

Source – Denver Museum of Nature : http://www.dmns.org

DENVER – October 12, 2010 – Beginning this Friday, October 15, the Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, WFPC2, will be on display for a limited time at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. The supercamera, which is the size of a baby grand piano, is credited with saving the Hubble Space Telescope mission and providing unprecedented and crystal clear pictures of our universe.

“The Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 ranks right up there with Galileo’s telescope and Newton’s apple, from a space science standpoint,” said Steven Lee, PhD, the Museum’s curator of planetary science. “From the public standpoint, this camera is Hubble. Hosting the WFPC2 is an amazing opportunity our museum, especially given the timing of our IMAX 3D grand opening featuring the Hubble film and our Space and Sea Spectacular scheduled for this weekend.”

Museum visitors will have a unique opportunity to see this remarkable scientific instrument, complete with several “craters” in its outer skin that were caused by micrometeorite impacts during its years in orbit. Special related programming will be offered on Saturday, October 16, and Sunday, October 17, during the Museum’s Space and Sea Spectacular, which is included with general admission. Additionally, visitors to the Museum’s new IMAX 3D theater will experience actual 3D footage taken in 2009 when shuttle astronauts removed WFPC2 from Hubble.

The Story of the WFPC2
The WFPC2 camera replaced the first camera on board NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in 1990 with the promise that it would bring in a new era of astronomical discovery. Soon after the launch, NASA learned that the first camera had a defective main mirror and transmitted only blurred images back to Earth. After three years of work by NASA scientists, the WFPC2 was installed and soon the camera began offering stunning, razor-sharp images of our universe.

For 16 years, the WFPC2 offered front-row seats to the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter, provided dramatic evidence for super-massive black holes at the core of many galaxies, detected thousands of galaxies in a “blank” region of the sky, observed weather on many of our neighboring planets, and returned views of star-birth in the Eagle Nebula’s “Pillars of Creation.” Many of these images were not only incredibly valuable to scientists, but also incredibly beautiful to the general public. Hubble became “the people’s telescope,” and the WFPC2 was the workhorse instrument of the mission; it was the camera that saved Hubble.

The WFPC2 was replaced with a new camera and returned to Earth in 2009, during the final Shuttle mission to service the Hubble–and this effort became the storyline of Hubble, now playing in IMAX 3D at the Museum. Since May 2010, the camera has been on display at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where it was built. Through a special loan arrangement with NASA, it will make a brief stop in Denver while en route to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Facility in Maryland.

Space & Sea Spectacular – IMAX 3D Opening Celebration
Free with Museum Admission on Saturday, October 16 and Sunday, October 17
The Museum is celebrating the grand opening of its new IMAX 3D theater with a weekend full of free special programs and activities centered around space and sea. Visitors will learn about 3D photography, view the Sun through solar telescopes, explore the world of robotics, and take a look at some of the amazing sea shells from the Museum’s collections. Special guests will conduct chemistry experiments, give tours of the universe, answer questions about the fin whale skeleton floating overhead, and more. Below are highlights.

• 12:30 p.m. on Sunday – Astronaut Emeritus Bruce McCandless II shares stories of his space exploration and connection to the Hubble. He worked on designing Hubble to be serviceable in orbit, and was an astronaut on the April 1990 space shuttle mission that carried the telescope into orbit. He will participate in Q&A with the audience and be surrounded by dramatic space images within the planetarium.
• 3 p.m. on Sunday – McCandless shows the WFPC2 and the explains features engineered into Hubble and its instruments that allow for the on-orbit “house calls” and have made Hubble one of the premier scientific endeavors of all time
• 11:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Saturday – Steve Lee, the Museum’s space science curator, will explain his use of the Hubble Space Telescope and WFPC2 to observe weather on Mars.
IMAX 3D Digital Upgrades
The Museum recently completed digital upgrades to the latest IMAX 3D technology, which now delivers the world’s most immersive movie experience. Enhancements in the theater include IMAX’s powerful digital projection system, IMAX’s latest digital sound system, and a new IMAX screen.

Hubble 3D
Hubble 3D offers a gripping story full of hope, crushing disappointment, dazzling ingenuity, bravery, and triumph. Hubble recounts the amazing journey of the Hubble Space Telescope, arguably the most important scientific instrument since Galileo’s original telescope and the greatest success in space since the moon landing. Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and presented with the latest 3D technology, Hubble will change the way you see the universe. Showing daily at 11:30 a.m., 2 p.m., and 4 p.m., with an additional showing at 6 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. View the trailer and see ticket prices.

Camera That Saved Hubble to Visit Museum : Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

Images from the WFPC2
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/hubble20th.html
http://hubblesite.org/