This new tool is only one of Hubble’s birthday celebrations. The page allowing users to discover their birthday photo encourages users to share the image with the hashtag #Hubble30 in order to celebrate the telescope’s birthday. Since its launch, it has taken more than a million photos, and played a critical role in advancing our understanding of the universe.Īccording to NASA’s website, one of the main discoveries Hubble helped with was the “discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.” Hubble, is about the size of a large school bus, and weighs as much as two “full-grown African elephants,” according to NASA.

The picture shows the 'Great Dark Spot' - a storm in Neptune's atmosphere - and the bright, light-blue smudge of clouds that accompanies the storm. The telescope, named for American astronomer Edwin P. This picture of Neptune was taken by Voyager 2 less than five days before the probe's closest approach of the planet on Aug. It orbits Earth at about 27,400 km per hour and uses this vantage point above the cloud layer to peer deep into space. The telescope doesn’t propel itself around the galaxy. It was the first major telescope to be put in space, and has been hurtling around Earth ever since. The Hubble Space Telescope was first launched in 1990 as a project of international cooperation between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA. The photos come with a brief description and a link to a bigger version of the image so users can learn more about it. The dazzling images range from galaxies, to nebulas, space gases, and star clusters.įor example, if today, April 11, is your birthday, you would see an infrared image of the centre of the Milky Way itself, a fiery red band of twisting star structures taken in 2008. It prompts you to input the day and month that you were born, and then finds a photo of the cosmos that was taken on that day during Hubble’s 30 years in space.

“What Did Hubble See on Your Birthday?” is the name of the new page on NASA’s website. The six scenes were collected by Landsat 4’s Thematic Mapper sensor in four passes: July 22, August 7 and 16, and September 7, 1989.For Hubble Telescope’s 30th birthday, NASA is giving the public a gift - a new online tool that allows you to see a photo of deep-space that the telescope took on your birthday. The Landsat image is a combination of six scenes, downsampled to match the resolution of the MODIS image. It should also help to stabilize the continental climate-increasing rainfall, smoothing out winter-summer temperature extremes, and suppressing dust storms. The northern Small Aral Sea will be allowed to refill from the inflow of the Syrdar'ya, and though it is never expected to regain its former extent, planners think that it will refill enough to support a robust fishing again. The World Bank effort will construct a permanent dike (a temporary one made of sand has been in place since about 1995) between the two portions of the Sea, sealing the southern half’s fate. The southern Aral Sea has been deemed beyond salvaging, and the restoration effort will instead focus on the much smaller, but less polluted and saline, northern sea (top right). Recent hydrographic surveys have revised downward the lifespan of the dying lake complete desiccation could happen in as few as 15 years. The image at right was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite on August 12, 2003, and it shows the rapid retreat of the Sea’s southern half, now separated into a western and eastern half, both of which may face the same bleak future. What water makes its way back to the Sea is increasingly saline and polluted by pesticides and fertilizer. As the agricultural land becomes contaminated by the salt, the farmers try to combat it by flushing the soil with huge volumes of water. Dust storms increased, spreading the salty soil right into the agricultural lands. The drying out of the Sea’s southern part exposed the salty seabed. The diversion process began in the 1960s, and by 1989, Landsat satellite imagery (left image) showed that the northern and southern half of the sea had already become virtually separated. The southern part of the Sea was fed by the Amurdar'ya and the northern part was fed by the Syrdar'ya, forming a large inland lake that moderated the region’s continental climate and supported a productive fishing industry. Once the fourth largest lake on Earth, the Aral Sea has shrunk dramatically over the past few decades as the primary rivers that fed the Sea have been diverted and tapped nearly dry for cotton farming and other agriculture. In July 2003, the Kazakhstan government, with funding from the World Bank, began a massive restoration project for the Aral Sea.

AugAqua MODIS scene at 250 m resolution (276 k JPEG).

July - September, 1989 Landsat mosaic at 250 m resolution (364 k JPEG).

Nasa picture of the day 1989