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."

Aristotle was wrong—just ask Galileo's ghost.

The 17th-century Italian was on hand today to witness the official opening of the National Air and Space Museum's Public Observatory, a new 22-foot (6.7-meter) dome housing a more than 40-year-old telescope.

"Galileo" and David DeVorkin stargaze in front of the observatory's dome.
—Photograph by Eric Long/NASM, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

The 16-inch (40-centimeter) Boller and Chivens telescope is an artifact on loan from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, once a feature of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., but now based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The telescope had been purchased in 1966 and used for research at Harvard's Oak Ridge Observatory, about 30 to 40 miles (48 to 64 kilometers) from Cambridge.

When Oak Ridge closed in 2005, the museum's senior space historian, David DeVorkin, had an idea: Bring the historic telescope to the Mall, but don't put it in a display case. Instead, make it available for public use.

Starting today, museum visitors can head over to the East Terrace Tuesdays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and see like an astronomer. And yes, it is entirely possible to closely examine the sun (with special filters), the moon, and several of the brighter stars, planets, and nebulae during broad daylight.

—Photograph by Eric Long/NASM, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

Like a Mauna Kea dome in miniature, the new facility has a rotating top and a sliding door in the ceiling to protect the telescope from the elements. FYI, if you're there on a cloudy or rainy day, you won't be able to use the observatory.

Overall, the project makes for a nice complement to the museum's collections, since it should help the museum's seven million annual visitors gain first-hand understandings of the science presented inside the building, noted museum director General John R. "Jack" Dailey.

"The observatory will enable us to share our mission in an interactive way," Dailey told reporters at this morning's unveiling ceremony.

And Wayne Clough, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, called the telescope a "key element" in the museum's education mission, "since it is so physical, so dramatic."

Speaking of drama, one of the highlights of the ceremony was DeVorkin's speech, which was interrupted by an unnamed actor portraying Galileo.

In a re-enactment of many an astronomer's dream interview, DeVorkin plied Galileo for information about his famous first glimpses of the heavens 400 years ago and how he came to his now celebrated conclusions about what revolves around what.

Contrary to the then-beloved teachings of Greek philosopher Aristotle, "the heavens are not perfect," Galileo told the crowd. Just look at the orb of the moon. Its seemingly smooth face is actually littered with valleys and mountains [really impact craters, later astronomers figured out].

The moon's pockmarked surface is clearly visible in a picture taken August 3 with a Meade Lunar and Planetary Imager mounted on the Public Observatory's telescope.
—Photograph courtesy Smithsonian Public Observatory Project

"And have you looked at the little ears on Saturn?" Galileo asked. Or at Jupiter, which has four distinct spheres in its orbit? If something is rotating around Jupiter, that means not all things in the heavens revolve around Earth!

Galileo published some of these initial findings in 1610 in Sidereus Nuncius, the first scientific "paper" based on telescopic astronomy.

A first edition of this publication is also on display for the next three months at Air and Space, safely ensconced inside the museum's "Explore the Universe" gallery.

On October 9, 2009, a piece of launch rocket still attached to an orbiting spacecraft will finally let go so it can take a dive into the moon.

The event is the end goal of NASA's LCROSS mission, which aims to study material kicked up by the impact to find out whether the lunar surface has water ice.

Today NASA announced that Cabeus A, a 25-mile-wide (40-kilometer-wide) crater on the moon's south pole, will be the site in the mission's crosshairs.

[LCROSS's Candidate Impact Craters -- That's Cabeus A Marked as "SP C"]
—Picture courtesy NASA/Ames Research Center

Not too much is known about this crater, which is part of the reason it was selected. Cabeus A sits on a region of the moon that's almost always in shadow, making it more likely that any water ice could exist there, since it wouldn't have been effectively vaporized by direct sunlight.

The crater is also among the sites on the moon known to have a mysterious quantity of hydrogen, which your grade-school chemistry teacher would remind you is a major component of good old H2O. Cabeus A in particular has a high concentration of hydrogen clustered in what NASA scientists call a "sweet spot" near its rim.

Finally, Cabeus A rests along an edge of the moon that is easily visible from Earth, making it an ideal place to send up a plume for people to see.

The plume will be bright but short lived, lasting only about 30 seconds before it starts to fade, LCROSS scientist Tony Colaprete said today at a news briefing.

To get the most out of this "flash in the pan," the LCROSS team has coordinated a vast army of stargazers on the ground and in space to watch the event and collect as much information as they can about the plume.

Top of the list will be the LCROSS craft itself, which will be speeding toward the impact site just after it sends the leftover rocket hurtling toward the moon.

Instruments aboard LCROSS will collect data about the plume and the newly minted impact crater until the probe looses contact with Earth about 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) above the lunar surface. Four minutes after the first impact, LCROSS itself will then slam into the moon.

The duty roster also includes massive telescopes in Hawaii and the U.S. Southwest as well as orbiters such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the GeoEye imaging satellite.

In addition, NASA has put out the call for amateur astronomers with backyard telescopes to train their instruments on Cabeus A and report back via a "citizen science" web site.

The data entry page isn't up and running just yet, but if you'd like to take part LCROSS does have a page full of tips for when and where to look, what equipment to use, and how to take pictures.

The impact will happen at 4:30 a.m. Pacific time, which should allow enough darkness for the plume to be visible to people in the Western Hemisphere. Us folks on the East Coast will have our view blocked by dawn skies, but we can watch live streaming video of the moon crash on NASA TV.

For an idea of what you might see, go out and look at the moon tonight, LCROSS experts suggest: The moon is in the same phase right now as it will be on impact day.

As for what we might find, water is the goal but it's not the only option. Hydrogen could also mean the moon's pockets are full of methane, hydrocarbons, or whatever else the body has collected over the last 3.5 billion years, Colaprete noted.

Water or no, the plume's contents, he said, will be "a window into the past of the entire inner solar system."