NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA Sets Target Launch Date for Hubble Mission

The Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA HOUSTON -- NASA announced Thursday that space shuttle Atlantis' STS-125 mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope is targeted to launch May 12, 2009.

The final servicing mission to Hubble was delayed in September when a data handling unit on the telescope failed. Since then, engineers have been working at Goddard and elsewhere to prepare a spare for flight. They expect to be able to ship the spare, known as the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling System, to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in spring 2009.

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> More information on the servicing mission

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Scientists Have a New Scientific Tool for Hurricane Research On-Line at NASA

Credit: NASA
Scientists, students, and applications users seeking on-the-fly visualizations and analysis of hurricane-related satellite and model data can now get access to it via the NASA Hurricane Data Analysis tool on-line. This tool was created by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), Greenbelt, Md., to help provide valuable hurricane research information, as well as easy data access to a collection of multi-sensor datasets.

Before selecting and downloading the tropical cyclone data of most interest, the NASA Goddard Hurricane Data Portal will assist researchers to investigate key parameters for tropical cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons around the world.

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Swift Looks to Comets for a Cool View

Swift's caught sight of a fragment of Comet 73P as it passed the famous Ring Nebula (oval, bottom) on May 7, 2006. Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler and Dennis Bodewits
> View video NASA's Swift Gamma-ray Explorer satellite rocketed into space in 2004 on a mission to study some of the highest-energy events in the universe. The spacecraft has detected more than 380 gamma-ray bursts, fleeting flares that likely signal the birth of a black hole in the distant universe. In that time, Swift also has observed 80 exploding stars and studied six comets.

Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope captured a striking sequence that shows unresolved blobs of dust trailing from a crumbling comet. In early May 2006, when the largest fragment of Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (SW3) passed Earth, Swift monitored its approach.

The piece, known as fragment C, is believed to be the comet's main body, which began splintering in 1995. In 2006, astronomers counted 66 fragments. Telescopes -- including NASA's Hubble and Spitzer -- revealed dust and condensations trailing several pieces. But fragment C showed no unusual changes -- except to Swift's ultraviolet eye. "It's subtle, but Swift caught clouds of dust and perhaps small pieces that no one else was able to," Immler says.

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