Michael Soluri - Infinite Worlds: The People and Places of Space Exploration

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For sons Andre, Patrick, and Gabriel

Dedicated to the past and present American human spaceflight labor force

The Hubble Space Telescope, with its probing pictures, has rewritten the book on astronomy. Impressive as deep space may be, the Hubbles ability to capture its magnificence did not happen by chance. That ability came from the combination of many different engineering and scientific inputs, and the dedication of many individuals going back to the earliest days of the American manned space program. Over the decades, the increased skill in spacecraft rendezvous, satellite development, astronaut spacewalking, and photographic capabilityone flight building on anothercontributed to the realization of these spectacular Hubble pictures and the science that underlies them.

I took the first sunrise pictures in space with a hand-held camera from the Friendship 7 capsule in 1962. Comparing those first photos to the enormous reach and clarity of the Hubbles deep-space images illustrates just how far we have come in optics, satellite engineering, and on-orbit servicing of equipment by astronauts.

The artful photographs in this book also give deserved attention to a few of the many thousands of people who worked on the Space Shuttle and Hubble Space Telescope programs. They have been and continue to be a tremendous asset for our country, and contributed greatly to the exploration of the wonders of our universe.

Curiosity about the unknown is at the heart of all progress. With the Hubble and other exploration missions within or even beyond our solar system, we will start to fill in the blanks in our knowledge of the universe that lies well beyond our existence here on Earth, creating a better future for all.

JOHN GLENN, UNITED STATES SENATOR, RETIRED; NASA ASTRONAUT, RETIRED; COLONEL, UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS, RETIRED

Columbus, Ohio, March 2014

In an evolving and expanding universe, the X-ray light of the ancient galaxy 3C295, captured by NASAs Earth-orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, originated some 4.7 billion years ago...

... about the time that the third rocky planet of a ubiquitous yellow star in a spiral spur of the Milky Way galaxy was evolving into a water world.

The visible light from these four ancient galaxy clusters, captured by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, has been traveling outward through the universe for four billion years...

... dating from about the time that alkaline hydrothermal ventssimilar to these vents discovered near the deep trenches at the bottom of the Atlantic Oceanmay have provided the chemical building blocks and thermodynamic energy that possibly drove the emergence of life in Earths early oceans.

In the constellation Indus, visible in the southern sky, the light from a gamma-ray burst in the galaxy GRB 060614 (upper right) originated 1.6 billion years ago...

... at about the same time that the Vishnu Basement Rocks were forming the very lowest layers of the Grand Canyon during the Precambrian geologic era.

The light from Barnards Galaxy, located in the constellation Sagittarius, has been traveling toward Earth for 1.6 million years...

... beginning its journey at approximately the time during the Oldowan era that early Homo erectus began using sharp-edged chopper stones as tools.

Light left the ancient globular cluster Palomar 5, located in an outer spiral arm of our galaxy, and began traveling toward Earth some seventy-five thousand years ago...

... at about the same time that humans were engraving carefully incised, complex geometric patterns on red ochre in Blombos Cave on the southern coast of South Africa.

The light from the ancient globular star cluster NGC 1851, discovered May 29, 1826, in the constellation Columbia, began traveling approximately forty thousand years ago...

... at about the time that early humans or Neanderthals were creating disks and hand stencils by blowing or spitting red powdered pigment over their open hands on the walls of the El Castillo Cave in Spain.

Within our galaxy, the light emitted by the Cepheid variable star RS Puppis (top) travels for 6,500 years before it reaches Earth. The light traveling from the NGC 6188 nebula (bottom) takes 4,000 years.

Somewhere within that time frameat least five thousand years agoAborigines in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia painted Gwion Gwion abstractions of themselves and their method of transportation.