25 Years Ago, This Morning -- Shuttle Endeavor Launched To Repair Hubble, In Orbit...

Consider the sheer audacity of that mission: space telescope Hubble was returning somewhat fuzzy images -- due to a design flaw -- excessive "flatness", at the edges of its main mirror. [Interestingly, the flaw was later deemed to have been the result of a mathematical error, by Perkin-Elmer, a US medical device maker (and fabricator of the mirror) -- so. . . that's a back-handed connect to the topics of this blog, as well.]

Accordingly, NASA chose a bold course -- and loaded a replacement image receptor system into the shuttle's bay. It was essentially a receiver that corrected (with a compensating, opposite error), much as eyeglasses do -- the "visual acuity" of Hubble. And it worked. Over five shuttle missions, spanning more than a decade (delayed by the Columbia disaster's aftermath in 2003), all of Hubble's systems were upgraded and replaced -- while in Earth orbit.

So, in honor of that quarter century old NASA teamwork achievement, I'll re-run one, about Hubble (and a poet's "darker shade of beauty") from September of 2016:


UPDATED -- 2:20 PM EDT 09.26.2016: Plumes of water and water-vapor, rising perhaps 290,000 feet -- or almost 50 miles -- have been spotted by Hubble, on several occasions in 2014. I'll embed a great updated NASA video -- 2 minutes only -- describing the science behind all of it, immediately below. I will update my now dated graphic, shortly. But the evidence for the warmth of an undulating water ocean -- well below a sienna colored ice exterior shell -- is now nearly conclusive.

Yet again, a most sublime celestial epiphany is fittingly "writ in water" -- the stuff upon which we are all based. It is grin-worthy indeed that verdant life may already reside in Europa's (metaphorical) sloshing motherly womb. Astonishing.



[End, updated portion.]

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In an update to this post, of last week. . . I'll go out on a limb this late Sunday evening/early Monday morning, and guess that Hubble has spied more evidence of warm water -- an ocean of it, in fact -- subsisting below an icy shell, on the Jovian moon, Europa.

In a more fantastical iteration (as I wait for sleep to find me), I might guess (though I've not depicted it, at left) that Hubble has seen a recurrence of the 2012-era Europa surface water geysers -- then likely spouting up to ten times the height of Earth's Mount Everest -- or almost 290,000 feet. It seems some times, that which was "writ in water," cannot be forever restrained, nor even contained.

In any event, we will know it all -- at 2 PM Eastern. Onward, as beneath that deep space long ice-chilled shell, there moves an undulating, warm ocean -- and just possibly, an ocean where verdant life will one day again arise -- and that is truly grin-worthy. . . .

नमस्ते