National Geographic Society

Hubble's WFPC-2, now on display at Air and Space
—Picture copyright Smithsonian Institution

"The difference between an artifact and an instrument is that, now that it's an artifact, you can't touch it anymore."

So General Jack Dailey told astronaut John Grunsfeld during the opening of a new gallery in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum—now home to several significant artifacts from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Just a few short months ago, Grunsfeld was part of the shuttle mission sent to repair and upgrade the aging Hubble. The crew's tasks included removing the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC-2) and the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) so they could be replaced with more advanced instruments.

(See some of the first pictures from the upgraded Hubble.)

COSTAR, sometimes called Hubble's contact lenses
—Picture by Eric Long/NASM, copyright Smithsonian Institution

Air and Space made the phone booth-size COSTAR part of its new gallery, called Moving Beyond Earth, a high-tech setup full of interactives, computer feeds, and huge visual projections.

The gallery also houses the HST Power Control Unit Trainer, a life-size replica of Hubble's electrical nerve center. Grunsfeld was among the astronauts who used the trainer to practice replacing the unit during a 2002 servicing mission.

—Picture by Eric Long/NASM, copyright Smithsonian Institution

WFPC-2, meanwhile, gets a place of honor in the museum's Space Hall. The camera, about the size of a baby grand piano, "turned Hubble into the Great American comeback story," NASA's Edward J. Weiler told reporters during the gallery opening.

The now beloved space telescope had a few early setbacks, including the grim discovery shortly after launch that its primary mirror was deformed, making its science images pretty much useless.

WFPC-2 got installed during the first-ever Hubble servicing mission in December 1993, complete with its own built-in corrective optics that compensated for the faulty mirror.

(FYI, new instruments installed since then also carried their own corrective optics, eventually rendering COSTAR obsolete. It was removed to make room for a device called a spectrograph, designed to study the origins of the universe.)

The same mission added COSTAR, a bundle of tiny mirrors that sent corrected, focused light to the rest of Hubble's instruments. But WFPC-2 specifically went on to provide scientists with some of the most iconic Hubble pictures that both dazzled the public and offered new insights into the universe.

"Museums remind us of the choices we make as a culture." —David DeVorkin

(See WFPC-2's last "pretty picture" before the camera was removed in May 2009.)

"Hubble has more than fulfilled its promise," said senior curator of space history David DeVorkin.

But astronaut Grunsfeld, who joked about his title of "chief Hubble hugger," reminded the audience that it wasn't really the instruments that saved Hubble, it was the people.

"Museums remind us of the choices we make as a culture," DeVorkin added. During Hubble's development, people made the choice to build a space telescope that could see objects ten billion times fainter than the human eye.

People also made the choice to make that telescope something that could be regularly serviced rather than used until it broke and then abandoned.

And when Hubble suffered from its initial setback, people made the choice to find ways to fix what was quickly labeled as a national failure.

"It's a message of persistence," Dailey said. "Don't quit. Hubble is a perfect example of that."

By James Robertson, National Geographic Digital Media

One of the coolest-sounding missions launched by NASA comes to an explosive end tomorrow morning.  The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (or LCROSS) will smash into the moon at about 4:30 a.m. PST (7:30 a.m. EST), followed by another impact four minutes later. (Read the National Geographic News preview NASA Moon "Bombings" Tomorrow: Sky Show, Water Expected.)

The first stage of the LCROSS is designed to kick up a huge plume of dust in the permanently dark Cabeus crater at the south pole of the moon. The second stage contains scientific equipment to collect the dust and determine if it contains water ice, before crashing into the moon itself and causing a purely gratuitous explosion. 

According to the mission's NASA page, amateur astronomers with a 10 to 12-inch telescope should be able to see the dust plumes created by the impacts.

If you don't have a telescope, you can watch the camera footage from the satellite and mission control at the Newseum in Washington, DC, at a special watch party on their 40-foot high video wall, at other locations around the world, or on the Internet at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html.

You will also be able to watch video and read about the mission afterward on National Geographic News.

If water ice is found in the dust, it would confirm findings of water and hydroxyl molecules by NASA instruments aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft launched about a year ago.

Disclosure: James Robertson is a consultant for the Newseum.

At 5:55 p.m. ET today, the MESSENGER spacecraft will make its closest pass in its third and final flyby of the innermost planet.

Mercury, as seen from MESSENGER on September 28, 2009
—Image courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

When images from the flyby start pouring in around midnight, scientists hope the snapshots will reveal even more about the tiny world's rocky surface.

The flybys are part of maneuvers to bring MESSENGER safely into Mercury's orbit in 2011, making it the first probe to take off its proverbial coat and stay for a while in the planet's embrace.

Until 2008, only the Mariner 10 spacecraft had been anywhere close to Mercury, and that was just a drive-by back in 1974 and '75. What's more, Mariner was only able to take pictures of less than half the planet, leaving the bulk of Mercury shrouded in mystery for more than 30 years.

The first MESSENGER flyby in January 2008 showed the world a whole new side of Mercury—literally. Cameras snapped more than 1,200 pictures, imaging an additional 30 percent of the planet.

A second flyby in October 2008 added to the bounty, and now we have a pretty good idea of what 90 percent of the planet's surface looks like.

The latest flyby will take a few more shots of never-before-seen features, but it's mostly geared toward what the mission managers are calling targeted observations. In other words, this is a chance to take a closer look at interesting features spying during the previous flybys.

From the MESSENGER Web site:

The Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer (MASCS) will gather high-quality spectral data by "staring" at the chosen surface targets for ~30 seconds per target. Simultaneously, the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) will obtain many sets of high-resolution color images of the targeted regions using all 11 of its color filters. Together, the data from these targeted observations will provide a wealth of new information and insights into the nature and history of Mercury's surface.

For me, MESSENGER's results serve as an example of the information arms race between science and fiction.

I'm about halfway through the English translation of a Japanese science fiction novel called Usurper of the Sun by Housuke Nojiri. The book is all about a high school student who spots a tower being built on Mercury during a planetary transit—when Mercury passes in front of the sun as seen from Earth.

The tower, it seems, is made of nanobots that are using materials from Mercury to build a ring encircling the sun (you'll have to read the book to find out why). But the ring is in just the right spot that its shadow engulfs Earth, triggering environmental catastrophe and spurring a desperate race to make contact with the mysterious alien Builders.

Ultimately this book is not about Mercury—it's meant to be a philosophical take on the nature of aliens and what a first-contact scenario might be like [and about a beautiful, brilliant female student who is humanity's last hope for salvation, a fact that won't even faze anime fans the world over].

Trick is, the whole story hinges on us not knowing a darn thing about Mercury's backside. The book was published in 2002, two years before MESSENGER even launched. At that point, for all anyone knew, it was entirely plausible that aliens might have set up a nanobot workshop right under our noses.

Science fiction has a long history of building imaginative stories on plausible science that later turns out to be bunk. What, for example, would the Martian Chronicles have been about if Ray Bradbury had seen data from the Mars Mariner missions?

And poor Venus, once celebrated in fiction as the most likely planet to house non-Earthly life, was exposed by science in the 1960s as too hot and too under pressure for anything resembling humans to exist on its surface.

Thank goodness science in the '90s delivered unto us the first confirmed extrasolar planets, ushering in a whole new class of possible targets for the fictional (and literal) search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

On the flip side, science fiction is most frequently touted as the source of some of our modern technological advances. Star Trek tech gets closer to reality every day, it seems, and early SF masters like Verne and Wells are credited with practically inventing commonplace gadgets such as sliding doors and cell phones.

Heck, even the recent announcement that there is, in fact, water on the lunar surface just made Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress a touch more plausible.

Give astronomers a few decades, and I wonder what soon-to-be-published icons of SF will become either outdated whimsy or remarkable prescience?