Hubble Telescope Is Slated to Take 1st Picture Today

WASHINGTON —  The Hubble Space Telescope, the most powerful astronomical observatory ever lofted into orbit, is expected to take its first picture of the heavens today.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced Saturday that engineers had completed the early part of an elaborate checkout of the $1.5-billion telescope and would open a shutter on one of its cameras today for a wide-angle photo of a distant cluster of stars called Theta Carina, which is believed to be 3 billion years old.

Traditionally, a new telescope’s initial glimpse of the heavens is called “the first light.” For Hubble, the first light will have traveled across space for more than 12 centuries before reaching the orbiting telescope.

Engineers expect to receive the photo on the ground at 10:49 a.m. PDT and then release prints at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Space officials warned that the first effort will not represent the telescope’s best work. Nor will the photo have any great scientific value. But first light will mark the completion of weeks of work by engineers to test, focus and align the 25,000-pound telescope.

“We will consider it a total success if the first picture that comes down is as good as a ground-based exposure,” said Ed Weiler, NASA’s space telescope program scientist. “You’ll hear a lot of cheering when that happens.”

Weiler said the only real value of the first light photo is as “a useful engineering test.”

NASA engineers believe that Hubble, with its 94.5-inch diameter mirror and powerful light-amplifying and focusing equipment, eventually will take photos of stars that are 25 times fainter than the dimmest object visible from Earth. Pictures from Hubble are expected to have 10 times the clarity of photos taken by the most powerful ground-based telescopes.