Recently I joined a group of fifth graders to watch the Hubble 3D movie at the IMAX screen in Seattle’s Pacific Science Center. Hubble 3D creates the experience of riding through space based on 20 years of photographs recorded by the Hubble telescope from its orbit 350-400 miles above earth. The IMAX experience dwarfed my sense of wonder. I’m still overwhelmed, but one small conclusion is the budget we are spending is reasonable for its scientific value.

    Our ride from earth traveled from our solar system spinning into our Milky Way galaxy. That surprised me because my most vivid view of the Milky Way was from the shoulder of Little Sister Mountain in Oregon. The pasty white endless stream of stars was way up in the sky. It’s not up there. We’re in it here. My home galaxy has more than 100 billion stars and a diameter of 100,000 light years.

    One hundred billion felt large until I compared it to our nation’s debt of one trillion. Then we traveled through a tiny window in deep space where Hubble’s camera photographed 15,000 galaxies up to 10 billion light years away. That implies the whole universe has millions of galaxies. Wow. There are more stars in the universe than dollars in our federal debt. 

Galaxies add stars from nebulae, which are dust storms of gases and particles the size of planets. One magnificent photograph had a pinhead-sized sun underneath a rectangular burgundy nebula that looked like a giant sweater box. Scientists think the dust cloud spawned that sun, like a cloud that gave birth to our sun.

    The presentation displayed a magnificent, serene and orderly universe, until I realized the images were still-life photographs. Meteor fragments smashed into Jupiter leaving a hole far larger than earth. Stars explode and galaxies collide. One fifth-grader said her favorite picture was the beautiful floating butterfly sun. The butterfly’s body was an exploding sun and its wings were dust and gas speeding away at 600,000 miles per hour. We need to monitor this dangerous universe.

    Hubble’s discoveries have forced once-in-a-millennium rethinking about astronomy according to one leading scientist. Astrophysicists knew gaps between stars and galaxies are expanding but thought the pace is slowing down. Instead, the expansion is speeding up. Scientists have hypothesized it’s because dark energy inside the universe is propelling it outward. They don’t know what dark energy is. It may come from dark matter but they can’t see or measure it either. Mysteries abound, such as what is going on in a black hole? Why did all the heated gas in the universe become extremely cold and then warm up a billion years later?

    As most of my mind boggled at the science, part of my mind wondered about the cost. I was pleased to learn Hubble is a collaborative effort with the European Space Agency that provides 15 percent of the total funding. Hubble’s budget is included in NASA’s $1.1 billion astrophysics budget, a minor part of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, which is in turn a minor part of NASA’s $18.5 billion budget.

    The science emphasis is the most valuable public funding for NASA in my opinion and Hubble’s cost sounds reasonable for the scientific and inspirational value. Plans are on target to launch a new telescope located one million miles from earth by 2014 to take even more detailed pictures.