RIVERSIDE – (INT) - Bahram Mobasher, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, has received a two-year $200,000 grant from NASA to compile into a data bank all the imaging observations of galaxy surveys that the Hubble Space Telescope has performed since 2002, when a powerful imaging instrument, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, was installed on the telescope.

Carried into orbit in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope still remains in operation, and is one of the world’s most famous, popular and productive scientific instruments. Because of its orbit outside the Earth’s atmosphere, it is capable of taking extremely sharp images of galaxies in the most distant parts of the universe.

“This is a tremendously exciting data-mining project, a legacy program with a final product enormously useful for astronomers worldwide,” Mobasher said.

The Hubble imaging data will be supplemented by observations for the same galaxies in different wavelengths, taken from other ground-based and space-borne observatories.

Story Date: April 3, 2012