Donald Savage
Headquarters, Washington           April 30, 2002
(Phone: 202/358-1547

Nancy Neal
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
(Phone: 301/286-0039)

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore
(Phone: 410/338-4514)

RELEASE: 02-74

HUBBLE'S NEW CAMERA DELIVERS BREATHTAKING VIEWS OF THE 
UNIVERSE

     "Remarkable, breathtaking" are words jubilant 
astronomers are using to describe the first four views of the 
universe taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's new Advanced 
Camera for Surveys, released by NASA today.

The new camera was installed on Hubble by astronauts during a 
shuttle mission last March, the fourth Hubble Space Telescope 
servicing mission. During five of the most challenging 
spacewalks ever attempted, the crew successfully upgraded the 
orbiting telescope with the new camera, a new power unit, new 
solar arrays and an experimental cooling unit for an infrared 
camera. Hubble managers say the orbiting telescope has been 
operating superbly since the servicing mission. 

"Today marks the beginning of a new era of exploration with 
Hubble," said Dr. Ed Weiler, Associate Administrator for 
Space Science at NASA Headquarters, Washington. "Our team of 
scientists and engineers on the ground and the astronauts in 
space once again did the impossible. After 12 years in space, 
Hubble not only was given a major overhaul, its new camera 
has already shown us that, even after 12 years of great 
science and astounding images, we haven't seen anything yet." 

Among the suite of four "suitable-for-framing" Advanced 
Camera for Surveys (ACS) science-demonstration pictures 
released today is a stunning view of a colliding galaxy, 
dubbed the "Tadpole," located 420 million light-years away. 
Unlike textbook images of stately galaxies, the "Tadpole" -- 
with a long tail of stars -- captures the essence of a 
dynamic, restless and violent universe, looking like a 
runaway pinwheel firework.

"The ACS is opening a wide new window onto the universe. 
These are among the best images of the distant universe 
humans have ever seen," said astronomer Holland Ford of Johns 
Hopkins University in Baltimore, lead scientist in the 
camera's seven-year development.

The camera's tenfold increase in efficiency will open up much 
anticipated new capability for discovery. "ACS will allow us 
to push back the frontier of the early universe. We will be 
able to enter the 'twilight zone' period when galaxies were 
just beginning to form out of the blackness following the 
cooling of the universe from the big bang," said Ford.

The ACS is a camera of superlatives. It is expected to 
surpass the sensitivity of the largest ground-based telescope 
to eventually see the very faintest objects ever recorded. 
The camera delivers a panoramic crispness comparable to that 
of a wide-screen movie, containing 16 million picture 
elements (megapixels) per image. By comparison, digital 
photos from typical consumer cameras are 2 to 4 megapixels. 

The ACS image of the Tadpole illustrates the dramatic gains 
over the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 resulting from 
doubling the area and resolution, and demonstrates a five-
fold improvement in sensitivity. An unexpected bonus is the 
enormous number of galaxies in the new Hubble image beyond 
the Tadpole galaxy, giving it an appearance like the galaxy-
filled Hubble Deep Field (HDF) image, taken in 1995. However, 
the ACS picture was taken in one-twelfth the time it took for 
the original HDF. Like the Hubble Deep Field, the ACS 
galaxies contain myriad shapes that are snapshots of galaxies 
throughout the universe's 13 billion-year evolution. The ACS 
images are so sharp astronomers can identify "building 
blocks" of galaxies, colliding galaxies and extremely distant 
galaxies in the field -- an exquisite sampler of galaxies. 

"The ACS will let us obtain the deepest image of the universe 
for the foreseeable future," added astronomer Garth 
Illingworth of the University of California, Lick 
Observatory, Santa Cruz, the deputy leader for the camera 
team.

The other pictures include a stunning collision between two 
spiral galaxies, dubbed "the Mice," that presage what might 
happen to our own Milky Way several billion years in the 
future when it collides with the neighboring galaxy in the 
constellation Andromeda. Computer simulations show that we 
are seeing the collision of the Mice approximately 160 
million years after their closest encounter. Running the 
simulations forward in time shows that the two galaxies will 
eventually merge. A similar fate may await the Milky Way and 
the Andromeda galaxy.

Looking closer to home, ACS imaged the "Cone Nebula," a 
craggy-looking mountaintop of cold gas and dust that is a 
cousin to Hubble's iconic "pillars of creation" in the Eagle 
Nebula, photographed in 1995. 

Peering into a celestial maternity ward called the M17 Swan 
Nebula, the ACS revealed a watercolor fantasy-world tapestry 
of vivid colors and glowing ridges of gas. Embedded in this 
crucible of star creation are embryonic planetary systems.

In addition to the ACS, spacewalking astronauts installed a 
new high-tech mechanical "refrigerator" on Hubble during the 
servicing mission. This "cryocooler" has successfully pumped 
most of the heat out of the interior of the Near Infrared 
Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), achieving and 
maintaining to within a few hundredths of one degree the 
target temperature for neon gas passing through the 
instrument of 70 degrees Kelvin (minus 203 degrees Centigrade 
or minus 333 degrees Fahrenheit).

Engineers are now in the process of checking out the 
operation of the resuscitated NICMOS instrument. By early 
June, scientists expect to release the first astronomical 
images taken with the NICMOS since 1998, when it was still 
being cooled by a rapidly depleting block of solid nitrogen 
ice. 

The new rigid solar arrays, working with the new Power 
Control Unit, are generating 27 percent more electrical power 
than the previous arrays. This doubles the electrical power 
that can be allocated to the scientific instruments on 
Hubble. The new reaction wheel is operating normally. Nearly 
a month ago, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the 
Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 resumed science 
observations.

"This servicing mission has turned out to be an extraordinary 
success," said Preston Burch, Hubble Project Manager at 
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It was 
the most difficult and complicated Hubble servicing mission 
attempted to date and our 
observatory came through it with flying colors."

-end-

Electronic image files, animation and additional information 
are available on the Internet at:
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2002/11
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/latest.html
http://oposite.stsci.edu/publinfo/pictures.html
and
http://hubblesite.org/go/news