Europe is about to take an astronomical lead over U.S.



Next Monday, NASA will send a crew of astronauts to install greatly improved instruments on the 18-year-old Hubble Space Telescope. Just three days later, the European Space Agency will launch two even more advanced telescopes, named Planck and Herschel.

The American and European launchings will be "right on top of each other,'' said Jon Morse, the director of NASA's Astrophysics Division.

If all three instruments work as planned, scientists will be able to look back almost to the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. They could detect the first stars and galaxies, and prove — or disprove — theories about what happened in the first seconds after the "big bang,'' when cosmologists think that everything began.

Each of the three telescopes "sees'' things in a different wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. It's like looking through different windows on the cosmos.

Hubble sees mostly in optical light, the narrow band between infrared and ultraviolet that's visible to human eyes. Herschel will collect photons — particles of light — in a much wider infrared wavelength. Planck detects even longer microwaves, which carry photons left over from the big bang.

The three telescopes will study "different pieces of the universe,'' said Ray Villard, Hubble's news director. "They're complementary.''

Herschel will have the largest mirror ever put in space, 11.5 feet — 3.5 meters — across, half again as big as Hubble's mirror. Planck will have the sharpest vision, detecting differences as small as two parts in a million. Hubble, meanwhile, is better able to study galaxies, stars and planets beyond our solar system.

To save money, ESA will launch Planck and Herschel atop a single Ariane 5 rocket from the European spaceport in French Guiana, on the coast of South America. They'll travel separately to a point 900,000 miles — 1.5 million kilometers — away, where they'll enter a year-long orbit around the sun.

Herschel, named for British astronomer William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus, will sweep the entire sky every six months over a three-year period. It'll build the most accurate map ever made of the cosmos.


The best American infrared telescope, NASA's five-year-old Spitzer Space Telescope, has a much smaller mirror — 2.8 feet, or 0.85 meters — and a narrower viewing range than Herschel does.

"Herschel is big brother to Spitzer,'' Villard said. "Herschel does everything Spitzer does, but does it better.''


"Planck will provide the deepest, clearest, sharpest and least obstructed view of the beginning of the universe ever seen,'' said Benjamin Wandelt, a Planck scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It will be "a quantum leap in our ability to address fundamental questions about how the universe began, (such as) 'What banged at the big bang?' ''


As they streak into space, the ESA satellites will pass NASA's shuttle Atlantis parked at the Hubble telescope 375 miles — 600 kilometers — above Earth. Astronauts are to make five spacewalks to complete the fifth and final Hubble servicing mission



Another new instrument, a Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, will analyze ultraviolet light streaming from faint, far-off objects. By breaking up the UV rays, it can detect the "fingerprints'' of elements essential to life, such as carbon and iron.


More information on Herschel

More information on Planck

More information about Hubble


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