From now on, the European Space Astronomy Center (ESAC) in Villanueva de la Cañada (Madrid) will host the Hubble scientific data. In this way, the European Space Telescope Archivewill be integrated with the databases of the other ESA missions(European Space Agency), which will be available to researchers around the world.
Since 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has been orbiting the Earth and has made some of the greatest astronomical discoveries of our era. For example, thanks to Hubble observations, the composition of the atmosphere of many planets outside our Solar System is known today, it is known that the expansion speed of the Universe has increased in the last million years and galaxies have been identified that they were formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang.
All of these observations are possible because Hubble orbits outside the Earth’s atmosphere, thus eliminating the effects of turbulence. In addition, the atmosphere filters infrared and ultraviolet light, so the images that reach ground-based telescopes are much less sharp than those that reach a space telescope. Hubble was also designed to be able tobe repaired in orbitby astronauts on duty missions. So far, five missions have been carried out in which new instruments have been arranged and installed to improve the telescope’s capabilities.
The data collected by Hubble was stored at the ST-ECF (Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility) in Germany. Since its closure in 2010, the archive remained there provisionally until its current transfer to the ESAC, to which data from other missions such as Cluster and Ulysses are also being transferred. “Archives are an increasingly important part of astronomy research,” says Martin Kessler, Head of ESA’s Department of Science Operations. “By linking them to the modern archives of other ESA astronomical missions, such as XMM-Newton, Herschel, Planck and ISO, we can guarantee thatEuropean researchers will have full and uninterrupted access to Hubble data“.
Digital archives now make it possible for the data to be used over and over again for numerous studies, multiplying the potential scientific productivity of the telescope. Both the international astronomical community and the interested public have access to Hubble observations one year after they were made.
