Following the successful launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope this week, NASA has confirmed that its predecessor, the Hubble Telescope is now obsolete.
Astronauts passing on the International Space Station say the news has hit Hubble hard. “It’s as if the spark has gone out of its life,” said one. “It’s just floating there, aimless”.
Another said: “The mirrors need cleaning for a start. “It’s as if it has given up now. It’s just kicking cans around the universe with its hands in its pockets. And you can forget SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Hubble isn’t bothered anymore. SETI? It’s more like a settee and a six-pack.”
Numerous news reports have made the situation worse for Hubble. The BBC Science Correspondent Pallab Ghosh-is-it-as-big-as-that said: “The Nancy Grace Roman telescope will capture vast panoramic views of space, with a field of vision 100 times larger than Hubble. It will explore billions of galaxies, some of which may have planets with temperate atmospheres similar to our own.”
The telescope is named after physicist Nancy Grace Roman, who isn’t the girl with the weird name in your Year 10 class at school, that was Deidre Longbottom; no, Nancy Grace Roman was Nasa’s first chief astronomer in the 1960s and its first female executive.
Meanwhile, Hubble – named after Edwin Hubble, a US astronomer from the black-and-white era – is now heading to be known as ‘Whobble?’, as he joins the ranks of ‘Neets’, those pieces of space flotsam ‘Not in Education, Employment, or Telescopy’
Image: NASA Hubble Space Telescope - Hubble Space Telescope, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70818886
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