Hubble's images 'shockingly good'

BALTIMORE - For a jittery, nearsighted robot, the Hubble Space Telescope has produced what one scientist called some "shockingly good pictures," including a dazzling new image of Saturn, and what may be light bounced from the walls of a black hole.

But the telescope's latest art work is a mix of agony as well as ecstasy for scientists. It not only demonstrates that the orbiting observatory can perform better than they first feared, despite a flaw in its main mirror; it reveals the Hubble's limits and reminds scientists of what might have been.

"I'm cheerfully depressed," said Riccardo Giacconi, who heads NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute, where the new images were released.

The telescope, launched to orbit 380 miles above Earth in April, still sees relatively bright objects in much more detail than ground-based telescopes can show and, with the aid of computer enhancement, promises great new discoveries.

But the built-in flaw, revealed in late June, has cost the Hubble its ability to discern details in very faint, distant objects, scientists said.

One of its primary missions was to discover the rate at which the universe is expanding, and therefore its age. But the new images indicate the unusual stars that were to be used as yardsticks for this purpose are too faint for Hubble, at least until a crew of shuttle astronauts gives the telescope what amounts to a new pair of glasses in 1993.

Meanwhile, the Hubble has illuminated some new paths for scientists to follow.

In a nearby spiral galaxy, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera has revealed for the first time small clouds of ionized gas at the core, glowing "like moths caught in a flashlight beam," said Holland Ford of Johns Hopkins University.

The source of the light, he said, is believed to be the energy at the edge of a black hole - an object with one million times the mass of the sun compressed to a single point.

The team used the European-built Faint Object Camera to follow up on a search for a faint star lost in the midst of 100,000 others 70,000 light years from Earth. The star had stood out in images taken in 1938, when it suddenly erupted cataclysmically. At the point where astronomers had hoped to find the nova in its quiet state, they found six candidates, but scientists are not sure which of several objects is the nova.