The Hubble Space Telescope, one of NASA’s Great Observatories and a vital research tool, is scheduled to undergo a final servicing mission in May, but scientists at Rochester Institute of Technology felt no need to wait until then to improve the telescope’s imaging capabilities. Led by Dan Batcheldor, scientists devised a nine-orbit calibration plan to recalibrate Hubble’s near-infrared camera and multi-object spectrometer when the instruments’ calibrations were stalling Batcheldor ‘s investigation of active galactic nuclei.
The instruments are vital for researchers because they enable high-precision polarimetry, a technique to see around clouds of dust and gas and into the center of active galactic nuclei and the potential planet-forming disks around young stars. “Polarimetry is really quite a powerful tool in astronomy because it
can essentially see around corners by the way light is reflecting,”
said Batcheldor in a press release. “When you do polarimetry what you
are essentially looking through is a set of polaroid sunglasses. What a
polaroid does is it makes you see only light aligned in a certain way.”
From the press release:
Recalibrating the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer was what Batcheldor describes as something of a “nightmare.” His team devised a program that could choreograph three different filtered observations of a single star at different orientations and switch between cameras within 45-minute fly-bys. “Essentially, we made Hubble chop all over the sky very quickly to get these observations,” he says.
Scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute verified the calibration plan would work and gathered the observations over 12 months.
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