DATE=05/05/02

TYPE=U-S OPINION ROUNDUP

TITLE=HUBBLE PICTURES

NUMBER=6-125659

BYLINE=ANDREW GUTHRIE

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

INTERNET=YES

EDITOR=ASSIGNMENTS

TELEPHONE=619-3335

CONTENT=

INTRO: Last week newspaper readers around the world were treated to some spectacular color photographs from the beginning of time. The Hubble Space Telescope, rejuvenated with a new, much more powerful camera, has taken breathtaking photographs of galaxies million of light years away from earth.

The pictures have elicited emotional and patriotic sentiments from some of the nation's editorial writers, and here with a sampling is _____________ and today's U-S Opinion Roundup.

TEXT: The Hubble Space Telescope was refitted with a new camera during an extensive space flight in March. The man in charge of space science for NASA [the National Aeronautics and Space Administration] says the two-billion-dollar observatory can almost be considered a new telescope because of the improvements. If ever the old saying about a picture being worth a thousand words was relevant this is the time.

Editorial writers around the nation grasped their dictionaries of superlatives to find appropriate words for the colors, the clouds and other mystical forms of galaxies seen at a time when our earth was being born. We begin the paeans in the mid-west where the Chicago Tribune traces the shaky beginning of the space vehicle to the triumph of the past few days.

VOICE: The Hubble Space Telescope started life 12 years ago as the butt of jokes: It was a two-point-two billion-dollar camera that took fuzzy pictures. Shortly after the space telescope was launched … NASA scientists realized that a polishing error on its mirrors was causing the distorted images it sent back to Earth. This was a big problem. Imagine that your glasses were ground to the wrong prescription, and you were more than 590-kilometers above the nearest Pearle Vision Center [Optician].

The jokes are over now. The Hubble's pictures are clear … and … spectacular. This week, NASA released photos taken by Hubble that show galaxies that are believed to have been formed when the universe was less than one-billion-years-old. In other words, in its infancy. … Hubble has turned out to be worth the money, but that was not the popular sentiment in 1990 when the monumental good marred its debut. A shuttle launch was the only way to correct it. Eventually Hubble got its correction, and the telescope orbiting 590-kilometers above earth began to fulfill its tantalizing early promise. Hubble has steadily pushed back the edges of the unknown.

TEXT: To Tennessee next, where an enthralled Commercial Appeal in Memphis writes:

VOICE: Seldom has the art of photography delivered anything so stunning or spectacular as the images from an amazing new camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. The swirl of colors is like a work of captivating art. Add the fact that what you are seeing is billions of light years away and stretches across billions of kilometers of space. Your eyes and your imagination working together leave you in a state of awe. Technology transports us to very nearly the beginning of the universe.

TEXT: In Ohio, The Cincinnati Post was equally impressed.

VOICE: You look, you see, you gasp. … The modern age may have its fair share of negatives, but what a blessed thing it is to live in an era when technology can transport the eye to very nearly the beginning of the universe. Let us applaud as well the nation that invested in this project - - the United States, of course. NASA launched Hubble in 1990 and then, in March of this year, sent a team of astronaut-repairmen up in a shuttle to fix an old camera and install this new one that is said to be ten-times as acute as the old one. The first images … convince you that the new camera is every bit as good as advertised.

VOICE: Turning to the daily often referred to as the nation's paper of record, The New York Times, we read these plaudits:

VOICE: … the startling pictures released this week from a newly-restored Hubble are a reminder that we had, in fact, begun to take for granted our ability to peer into deep space, an ability no generation of humans has ever possessed before. In a sense, these new images, produced with cameras and power sources … added or rejuvenated during a space shuttle flight in March, feel something like learning to see all over again. They remind us what an astonishing chapter of astronomical understanding, for scientists and laymen alike, the Hubble Space Telescope has opened.

For what the Hubble cameras show us, especially in their new incarnation, time itself. The distance of the distant objects in these images is measured as much by their relative youth, by how far back in time we must peer to see them, as by their distance measured in a spatial dimension.

TEXT: The views of The New York Times.

In Texas, The Houston Chronicle captures its thoughts first with a quote:

VOICE: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious," said [physicist and mathematician Albert] Einstein, who called it the source of both art and science. How beautiful, then, are the mysteries being experienced through the lens of the new camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, an instrument experts say may radically change what is known about the early and very distant universe.

TEXT: And lastly, from Northern New Jersey's Bergen County, The Record struggles to describe some of the pictures.

VOICE: … One looked like a swoosh in a speckled field. Another resembled poured milk surging up from some sort of volcanic tea. The last seemed like lichen from the edge of a geyser at Yellowstone National Park. But the reality is far more visceral. The swoosh is what cosmologists called the Tadpole galaxy, more than 400-million-light years from Earth. The milk-in-lava is the Cone Nebula, a 64-trillion-kilometers-long gaseous column of dust and interstellar matter.

… Such images should send shivers through our bodies. They highlight the immensity of creation and the smallness of humanity. They suggest the chaos from which we have come and the oblivion to which we may be heading.

TEXT: With that philosophical musing from The [Bergen County, New Jersey] Record, we conclude this sampling of editorials on the miraculous space photographs released last week from the rejuvenated Hubble Space Telescope.

NEB/ANG/SAB