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Mike Brown has been using the Hubble Space Telescope pretty consistently for most of the past three decades, since it launched in 1990. 自从哈勃太空望远镜于1990年装好以来，迈克·布朗在过去30年的大部分时间里一直在使用它。 But recently he had an experience with Hubble that he never had before. 但是最近他在用哈勃时有了一次前所未有的经历。 Brown, an astronomer at Caltech, got permission to use Hubble to do a detailed study of Jupiter's four largest moons. 布朗是加州理工学院的天文学家，他获准使用哈勃望远镜对木星的四颗最大的卫星进行详细研究。  These moons are called the Galilean moons, since Galileo Galilei spotted them in 1610. 这些卫星被称为伽利略卫星，因为伽利略在1610年发现了它们。 They include: Ganymede, which is bigger than the planet Mercury and has a mysterious magnetic field; Io, which is the most volcanically active place in the solar system; Europa, which has more liquid water than Earth; and Callisto, which is kind of a simple ol' cratered moon. 其中包括:伽倪墨得斯，它比水星大，有一个神秘的磁场;木卫一是太阳系中火山最活跃的地方;欧罗巴的液态水比地球多;卡利斯托是一个简单的坑坑洼的卫星。 After Hubble was supposed to have checked out Ganymede, the data got beamed down, processed, and sent to Brown by email. 在哈勃望远镜检查完伽倪墨得斯后，数据被传送下来，经过处理，然后通过电子邮件发送给布朗。 He eagerly opened it up. 他迫不及待地打开了这封邮件。 There was nothing there. 里面什么都没有。 I just tried to observed Ganymede with the Hubble Space Telescope and the data look like empty sky. 我试着用哈勃太空望远镜观察伽倪墨得斯，而数据看起来就像空无一物的天空。 Did someone kill Ganymede before I could get to it? 难道有人在我观看到伽倪墨得斯之前把它毁掉了吗？ I am going to be very angry. 我当时很气愤。 I guess it also could be an HST pointing failure. 我想也可能是哈勃瞄准系统失误。 But, given 2020, I expect it was destruction. 但，今年都2020年了，我想哈勃望远镜可能是坏了。 He immediately thought to himself, "What did I screw up this time?" which is, as he puts it, "pretty much what you always do as a scientist, when you see something that didn't work." 他马上就想:“这次我哪里出错了呢?”用他的话说，“就像一个科学家经常做的那样，当你看到一些没用的东西时就会这样想。” He checked and rechecked the instructions he sent to Hubble. 他反复检查了发送给哈勃的指令。 They were fine. 指令没问题。 Nonetheless, it turns out that Hubble had been pointing at the wrong patch of sky. 尽管如此，事实证明哈勃指向的是错误的一片天空。 Brown says this kind of error quickly happened two more times as he tried to survey Jupiter's moons. 布朗说，当他试图观测木星的卫星时，这种错误很快又发生了两次。 "I don't know if three times in a week is unusual or not, but it seems pretty unusual to me," says Brown. 布朗说:“我不知道一周错三次是不是不寻常，但对我来说，这已经很不寻常了。”  Tom Brown, head of the Hubble mission office at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore—and no relation to Mike Brown--says that Hubble does indeed just sometimes aim in the wrong direction. 汤姆·布朗是位于巴尔的摩的太空望远镜科学研究所哈勃任务办公室的负责人，他和迈克·布朗没有任何关系，他说，哈勃确实只是有时候瞄准了错误的方向。 "It used to happen on the order of about one percent of the time," he says. 他说:“这种情况过去只发生在大约百分之一的时间内。” "These days, it happens more like five percent of the time." “如今，这种情况发生的几率大约为5%。” This is an aging telescope, after all. 毕竟，这台望远镜已经很老了。 Back in 2018, when a gyroscope on Hubble failed, researchers activated one of its on-board spares—the so-called gyroscope 3. 早在2018年，当哈勃上的一个陀螺仪失灵时，研究人员就启动了哈勃上的一个备用装置——陀螺仪3。 It's been glitchy from the get-go. 换了之后它就开始出问题了。 "It tells you the telescope is moving around even when it's not," explains Brown. 布朗解释说:“即使望远镜没有移动，它也会显示出移动。” Telescope operators compensate for this error, but sometimes it gets out of whack before they're able to adjust things. 望远镜操作员会补偿这个错误，但有时在他们能够调整之前就会出现混乱。 A disappointed researcher can submit a request to have a do-over, and they'll generally get their data eventually--assuming they weren't trying to see some once-in-a-million years brief cosmic event. 一个失望的研究人员可以提交一个重来的请求，他们最终通常会得到他们的数据——假设他们不是试图看到一些百万年一遇的短暂宇宙事件的话。 No one really knows why gyroscope 3 is such a pain, says Brown, and conceivably, it could get so bad that they might have to turn that one off. 没有人真正知道为什么陀螺仪3是如此让人糟心，布朗说，可以想象，它可能会变得很糟糕，他们可能不得不关掉那个。 "The biggest downside then is, instead of having the entire sky available at any one time, we would have half the sky available at any one time," he says. 他说:“最大的问题是，如果关掉它，我们就只能观测半边天，而不是整个天空了。” Still, Hubble would remain enormously popular. 尽管如此，哈勃望远镜仍将广受欢迎。 Hundreds of teams get to use the telescope every year. 每年有数百个团队使用该望远镜。  They are the lucky ones, because there is so much demand that the majority of proposed observations have to be rejected. 他们是幸运的，因为有如此多的要求，大多数提出的观察结果都被拒绝了。 Hubble is currently being used for fields that didn't even exist when it was launched, like studying planets that orbit distant stars. 哈勃望远镜目前被应用的领域在当初安装它时还根本不存在，比如研究围绕遥远恒星运行的行星。  问题 文中提到木星的卫星有几颗？ 留言回复正确答案，前十名朋友可以获得红包奖励哦，赶快来试试吧！ |
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