From The Past To The Future Of The Hubble Telescope

The Hubble Telescope was named after Edwin Hubble. It was built and launched by NASA in 1990. Astronomers believed that the Hubble telescope would lead to many great discoveries because this telescope would allow us to see further into space than ever before.

The Reason Why People Were Thrilled By The Hubble Telescope

The Hubble telescope allowed us to get a better look into outer space so that we could learn more about the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope has provided us with stunning images of nebulae (like the Pillars of Creation), galaxies and even views of Mars and Saturn. In 2004, the telescope took a 1,000,000 second exposure of a tiny, seemingly empty area of the sky, The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, as its known, reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called "dark ages," the time shortly after the big bang around 13 billion years ago, when the first stars reheated the cold, dark universe.

Hubble Telescope History

In 1977 construction of the Hubble telescope began. It was worked on until 1985 and then finally launched into space on April 25, 1990. Since the first pictures were not very good, NASA launched a repair mission to fix the mirror, which was too flat on one edge. Another camera was also added in 1993. In 1997 older instruments were replaced on the Hubble telescope. Then in October of 1997 NASA decided that they would allow this telescope to operate until 2010 because there is so much that we have yet to learn about astronomy and space. As such, this telescope will be bringing us pictures for a few more years yet (until 2013 at least).

The Hubble Telescope Today

Hubble image of the Crab Nebula

Today, the Hubble telescope has more than met the expectations that NASA had set up for it. It has brought us a lot of fantastic images and helped us to make a number of great, new discoveries. In fact, thanks to the Hubble telescope we now know for sure that dark matter, which makes up 95% of the universe, is simply matter that we are not able to see with our natural eye. We have also learned that only around 5% of the universe is actually visible.

As you can see, the Hubble telescope is very important. This is because before it was launched, scientists and astronomers were only able to learn about space by studying starlight from the ground and the only pictures that they had were those that were taken from Earth. The Hubble telescope was a major step forward in astronomy. This led to numerous discoveries and spectacular, breath-taking pictures. These are by no means any ordinary pictures. The pictures actually have 20 times more information than the pictures that you would take with your digital camera.

Hubble Space Telescope News