Monthly Archives: July 2008

NASA prepares for Hubble telescope’s final upgrade

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Los Angeles Times: The $900-million effort, scheduled for launch Oct. 8, will be the fifth and last Hubble servicing mission, and engineers and scientists on the ground in Maryland have great hopes for the upgrade to one of the world’s best-known scientific instruments.

“I think it will put Hubble at the apex of its capabilities,” said David Leckrone, senior project scientist for the Hubble. Leckrone and other NASA scientists geared up for the launch at NASA Goddard, which manages Hubble’s day-to-day operations. Scientific operations are based at the Space Telescope Science Institute on the John Hopkins University campus in Baltimore.

Scientists at Goddard tested sensitive scientific equipment in an acoustic chamber to make sure that what goes into space can withstand the violent shaking that characterizes every shuttle launch and the eight-minute ride into orbit.

Let quantum mechanics improve your images

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Science: Images are superb conveyors of information. Recent research has shown how subtle quantum mechanical aspects of light can profoundly influence the nature of image formation.In the July 25 issue of Science, two important advances in this emerging area of quantum imaging are presented. Wagner et al. report on the behavior of two beams of light that are quantum mechanically entangled in position and direction of propagation–that is, the outcome of measurements on one beam depends on what sort of measurements have been performed on the other beam. Boyer et al. show that two image-bearing light beams can be entangled such that strong quantum correlations exist both between the two beams and between individual image features within each beam. They find two sorts of quantum correlations: The intensities of the two beams fluctuate in unison, at a level not permitted by classical statistics, and the noise in one part of the light field can be reduced, or “squeezed,” at the expense of another part.

Energy costs make light emitting diodes more popular

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New York Times: By lighting all of the building’s exterior and most of its interior with L.E.D.’s, Sentry Equipment Corporation in Oconomowoc, Wis. spent $12,000 more than the $6,000 needed to light the facility with a mixture of incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. But using L.E.D.’s, the company is saving $7,000 a year in energy costs, will not need to change a bulb for 20 years and will recoup its additional investment in less than two years.