Arming Hubble For 2012?

Atlantis launched at 2:01 p.m. EDT on one last maintenance mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, the 19-year-old orbiting observatory that floats at an altitude littered with space debris. The seven-member crew of space shuttle Atlantis lifted off Monday for one of the riskiest shuttle flights yet — so risky, in fact, that another space shuttle is ready to launch in case they need to be rescued. Maybe a new movie in the makings? 

Cosmologist, Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore says that we're going to get more great science. Just in time science for 2012 maybe? :-)

Hubble will go from a VW SuperBeetle to a high-powered race car," says astronomer Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington in Seattle. Hubble will peer at stars and galaxies formed 500 million years after the Big Bang, armed with a new camera 30 times more sensitive to light and a chemical spectrometer 10 times more effective. "We will be able to plan observations we never could before simply because the telescope will be more efficient," Livio said in an April interview.

Hubble has delivered many astronomical findings such as:

Cepheids, which are pulsating stars thousands of times brighter than our sun, serve as ready-made distance markers in space. Measuring Cepheids in galaxies such as the Spiral Galaxy M100 allows astronomers to create a framework by which they can precisely gauge distances throughout the sky.

Star blasts which means that after stars consume their hydrogen fuel, an explosion can't be far behind. Images of nearby explosions reveal the "light echoes" of blast waves shocking clouds of dust that escape from stars on the edge of eruption.

Black holes have been a great enhancement to our knowledge of the universe. Hubble has observed the stars orbiting near suspected super-massive black holes, from which nothing — not even light — can escape, such as the Sagittarius A* at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Hubble has also detected previously unsuspected middle-size black holes (merely 10,000 times more massive than the sun) in nearby galaxies.

"Deep field" images from Hubble first surprised astronomers by showing that the most distant, and earliest, galaxies don't resemble the spiral and football-shaped galaxies of the modern universe, but look more like "insects spattered on a windshield."

The age of the universe has been honed by the precision of the "Hubble constant," (also named for the astronomer Edwin Hubble) the measure of the universe's expansion rate. Hubble measurements of exploding stars led to the 1998 discovery of "dark energy," the unexplained observation that galaxies across the cosmos are moving apart at an accelerating rate.

Remarkably, the space telescope doesn't represent a very advanced observatory compared to massive telescopes on Earth, such as the 33-foot-wide mirror of Hawaii's Keck telescopes. But its location in orbit frees it from clouds, atmospheric distortion and city lights on Earth, making it invaluable to astronomers.

If you're a cosmologist, It's hard to conceive of a world without Hubble! And, with 2012 around the corner who knows what we'll find?