Outer Tweets

It's a little late in the mission to mention it, but you can follow Astronaut Mike Massimino's twitter feed to find out the latest on the mission to fix Hubble.

The picture here was forwarded this morning from my friend Dennis Hancock who helped engineer the optics in the box the astronaut is holding. It's called COSTAR and it's on its way home. COSTAR was the program to give Hubble eyeglasses for the spherical aberration in its optics. That repair was made during the last visit to Hubble in 2002. This week's repairs removed the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and replaced it with a new wide-field camera. I'm guessing someone checked the new optics carefully before launch.

Remember those fuzzy monochrome television signals from the Apollo missions to land on the moon? Now we're getting tweets, email, photos, and video from space in real time or near real time. It's like Hubble space travel, up close and personal. Soon enough we'll have better deep space images from Hubble, too.