The Hubble Space Telescope is a large telescope in space. Launched into orbit by space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. Hubble orbits at about 547 kilometers (340 miles) above Earth.
Interestingly, Hubble travels at a pace of 5 miles per second (around 8km/s), or with a speed of 17,000 mph (27,000 kph), and it takes 95 minutes to complete one orbit. So the distance that it covers in a minute is enormous. Its vision spans the ultraviolet through visible and into the near-infrared.
— Hubble is 43.5 feet (13.2 meters) wide with a maximum diameter of 14 feet (4.2 m). On Earth, it would weigh 24,500 pounds (11,110 kilograms).
— Around 120 gigabytes of scientific data are being transmitted by Hubble about every week. That would be roughly 3,600 feet (1,097 m) of books on a shelf. The collection of pictures and data is stored on magneto-optical disks.
— The telescope’s primary mirror is 94.5 inches (2.4 m) wide and weighs 1,825 pounds (828 kg). Its secondary mirror is 12 inches (0.3 m) wide and weighs 27.4 pounds (12.3 kg).
— Astronauts have served on missions that launched in December 1993, February 1997, December 1999, February 2002, and May 2009.
The telescope has made history with more than one million observations. These include detailed pictures of the birth and death of stars, galaxies billions of light-years away, and comet pieces crashing into Jupiter’s atmosphere (Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9).
More specifically, Hubble investigates everything from black holes to planets around other stars. Its unique capabilities are revolutionizing astronomy as Hubble continues humanity’s quest to explore the universe.
Therefore, images taken by Hubble have significantly contributed to science. Many scientists came to certain estimations considering the age and size of the universe.
They claim that the universe is almost 14 billion years old. Hubble’s innovative way of capturing spacial ”events”, has helped scientists to understand how planets and galaxies form.
Hubble has detected black holes, planets, stars, galaxies, and comets. The telescope has played a key role in the discovery of dark energy, and it has revealed details of gamma (ray bursts).
You can view Humble’s extraordinary photos here
A couple of weeks ago, NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its 32nd birthday. This amazing assembly includes:
References
www.nasa.gov
hubblesite.org
space.com
