Title:
Astronomers Still Look to Hubble Space Telescope
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
The Hubble Space Telescope continues to make
valuable discoveries after more than twenty years in
orbit around Earth. Hubble recently showed a fourth
moon orbiting Pluto. Astronomers temporarily named
it P4. The moon is the smallest to be discovered
around the icy dwarf planet. Astronomers estimate
that the moon is from thirteen to thirty-four
kilometers across. They first saw it in a Hubble
photo taken on June twenty-eighth. The American
space agency NASA launched the Hubble Space
Telescope in nineteen ninety. Reaching that day took
years of work. Ed Weiler is NASA's chief astronomer.
Mr. Weiler has worked closely with the Hubble
program since nineteen seventy-nine. He says that
when the Hubble was launched, it represented an
increase in the ability of other telescopes on Earth
by a factor of ten. He says the last time in
astronomy that something like this happened was when
Galileo put the first telescope to his eye. NASA's
first chief of astronomy was Nancy Grace Roman. Ms.
Roman joined NASA in nineteen fifty-nine. She led
the effort that resulted in the creation of the
Hubble Space Telescope.She says astronomers had been
wanting to get observations from above the
atmosphere for a long time. Looking through the
atmosphere is somewhat like looking through a piece
of old, stained glass. The glass has defects in it,
so the image is blurred from that.The Hubble
telescope orbits about five hundred fifty kilometers
above Earth. Ms. Roman says she still remembers the
first images that it captured. For her, the image
that was most striking was the center of a globular
cluster. Each individual star and its color could be
seen. The Hubble Space Telescope has helped expand
our knowledge of the universe. It helped scientists
estimate that the universe began about fourteen
billion years ago. Earlier estimates had placed it
between ten and twenty billion years old. The Hubble
telescope also confirmed the existence of black
holes. These are extremely dense masses believed to
exist at the center of most galaxies. Their
gravitational pull is so strong, they absorb light.
The Hubble Space Telescope completed its one
millionth scientific observation in July. NASA is
building a new space telescope to look even deeper
into the beginnings of the universe. For VOA Special
English, I'm Alex Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
