Experts Eye Hubble’s Successor

To see what no person has seen before is the dream of any astrophysicist or space scientist.

Helping make that dream a reality, more than 100 such scientists from around the world met in Boulder this week for the "Ultraviolet-Optical Space Astronomy Beyond Hubble Space Telescope" conference, where numerous presentations were given on space missions of the next century.

With the Hubble Space Telescope reaching the end of its lifespan about 2010, Jonathan Gardner, a scientist from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., unveiled plans for the possible followup to Hubble–the Next Generation Space Telescope.

"The basic goal figure out where we came from and if there are other planets like our own," Gardner said after his presentation Thursday morning.

The Next Generation Space Telescope, with deployment tentatively planned for 2007, is designed to do just that–look at the beginning of the universe, the formation of stars and the Milky Way galaxy. Down the road, Gardner hopes the technology will lead to the construction of a telescope that can view continents on distant planets.

"That's a long ways away," he said.

The cutting-edge telescope involves infrared astronomy as opposed to the ultraviolet-optical Hubble telescope. Rather than detect light, the Next Generation Space Telescope will detect heat radiating from planets and stars. Planets are easier to see in infrared, Gardner explained, because they release heat more than they reflect light.

Placed 1 million miles from Earth via an unmanned rocket, the telescope will be able to detect objects that are 1 trillion times fainter than what’s visible with the naked eye, he said. What’s more, the powerful instrument won't carry a hefty price tag.

"NGST is a very exciting instrument, but in the current budgetary conditions, it needs to be much cheaper than (Hubble)," Gardner said to the crowd.

He projected the total cost of the telescope at $1 billion, of which half is designated for construction.

Michael Shull, chairman of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is excited about the potential of the NGST and infrared astronomy. But he also said it won't answer all the questions about the universe.

"No single wavelength band is going to solve all the problems," he said.

Shull said he hopes after this three-day conference, scientific experts and telescope builders can design a set of space missions that involve astronomy of varying bands of light–from X-ray and ultraviolet to optical and infrared.