[background music]
Welcome to mission control for the iconic Hubble Space
Telescope. This is a virtual 360 degree tour of the facility, so
look around. You are currently in the lobby outside of the
Space Telescope Operations Control Center at NASA’s Goddard
Space Flight Center where the day to day operations for Hubble
are conducted. The tour starts next to a 1/5th scale model of
Hubble. The real telescope is about the size of a large
school bus, and would weigh 27,000 pounds on earth. Hubble
works like many backyard telescopes. It has two main
mirrors to gather light from the Universe and bring it into
focus: a primary mirror almost 8 feet across, and a secondary
mirror that is one foot across. Light that enters the telescope
hits the main mirror and gets reflected toward the smaller
secondary mirror. The secondary mirror then reflects the light
back through a small hole in the primary, where it enters
Hubble’s science instruments housed in the back part of the
spacecraft. Hubble has three types of instruments that
analyze light from the universe: Cameras such as its main camera
– the Wide Field Camera 3; spectrographs such as Hubble’s
newest one, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph; And
interferometers which are called Fine Guidance Sensors. In the
middle of the spacecraft there are four 100-pound reaction
wheels used to reorient the observatory. Based upon Newton’s
Third Law of Motion — for every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction — turning a reaction wheel in one direction
causes Hubble to turn the opposite way. Because Hubble is
so massive, it only turns at the speed of a minute hand on a
clock. On the wall you see two images of an incredible star
nursery in the Eagle Nebula nicknamed the Pillars of
Creation. These images, among Hubble’s most famous, reveal how
different the pillars appear in visible light and in
near-infrared light. The visible-light image shows small
tips that contain newborn stars and budding stars. The
near-infrared light can see through much of the gas and
dust, revealing thousands of stars behind the nebula and
inside the pillars. Further over, you see another image on
the wall of astronauts in space servicing Hubble. These
servicing missions included numerous spacewalks to help fix
and upgrade the telescope. The astronauts left Hubble in
outstanding condition in 2009 during the final servicing
mission and it is still at the peak of its scientific
capability today. Over by the windows is a tool box that was
used to transport tools into space. Known as the Auxiliary
Transport Module, it provided storage for the tools and safe
passage to and from orbit, protecting the tools from the
extreme cold of space. Two similar enclosures flew aboard
the final Hubble servicing mission.