Endeavour's three telescopes peered at two colliding galaxies that are thought to be 20 billion times the mass of the sun.
"I think we nailed it. I think we got a great observation," NASA astronomer Susan Neff said Tuesday. She is helping manage the imaging telescope.The diameter of these colliding galaxies is some 100,000 light years - the galaxies themselves are 90 million light years away.
Such a collision occurs over millions of years. Neff believes these two galaxies are in the middle of their encounter and that, millions of years from now, they might settle down and merge.
"We're looking for star formation in the debris after the collision," Neff said. "We're looking at what kinds of stars were in the galaxies before they collided, and we're trying to understand how the collision happened."
An even bigger question is why galaxy collisions are less common now than they were billions of years ago. "That's one of the things that the Hubble Space Telescope is trying really hard to find out," Neff said.
Neff and other scientists working with NASA's ultraviolet imaging telescope won't know the quality of this - or any - observation until sometime next month. Unlike the two other telescopes, which are sending down data throughout the flight, this telescope's observations are being recorded on film.
The 70mm film will be removed from the shuttle after its scheduled March 17 landing and then stored in a safe at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Scientists want to test the developing equipment one last time before they start developing the irreplaceable film.