All about the ancient tribes
The Hubble Space Telescope was designed to last 15 years. On April 24, it marks 30 years in space. About the size of a school bus, Hubble orbits the Earth capturing images of deep space. It was first conceived in the 1940s as the Large Space Telescope.
First conceived in the 1940s and initially called the Large Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope took decades of planning and research before it launched on April 24, 1990.
Hubble has circled Earth and gone more than 4 billion miles along a circular low earth orbit currently about 340 miles in altitude. Hubble has no thrusters. To change angles, it uses Newton’s third law by spinning its wheels in the opposite direction.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST), built and integrated at the Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT ) Space Systems facility in Sunnyvale, was launched 20 years ago aboard Space Shuttle Discovery, on April 24, 1990, ushering in a new golden age of astronomy.
Hubble is best seen from areas of the Earth that are between the latitudes of 28.5 degrees north and 28.5 degrees south. This is because Hubble’s orbit is inclined to the equator at 28.5 degrees. In contrast, the ISS passes over much more of the Earth because its orbit has a higher inclination at 51.6 degrees.
So it’s entirely possible that NASA will again extend Hubble’s operations after June 2021, provided the telescope can still point and use at least some of its instruments, even if others fail. All this means that Hubble got a renewed lease on life that may well carry it through several more decades.
The farthest that Hubble has seen so far is about 10-15 billion light-years away. The farthest area looked at is called the Hubble Deep Field.
Hubble orbits about 547 kilometers ( 340 miles ) above Earth.
The Hubble Space Telescope looked at a small patch of space for 12 days and found 10,000 galaxies, of all sizes, shapes, and colors. Some scientists think there could be as many as one hundred billion galaxies in the universe.
NASA
Agency overview | |
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Owner | United States |
Employees | 17,373 (2020) |
Annual budget | US$22.629 billion (2020) |
Website | NASA.gov |
Unlike on many previous NASA space science missions, anyone can apply for observing time on the Hubble Space Telescope. This is because Hubble can do breakthrough astronomical research that simply can ‘t be done from ground-based telescopes.
Overview. Webb often gets called the replacement for Hubble, but we prefer to call it a successor. After all, Webb is the scientific successor to Hubble; its science goals were motivated by results from Hubble.
NASA astronomers discover new things in the universe. If you want to be an astronomer, you should study science and math in college.
The Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) instrument, about the size of a telephone booth, placed into Hubble five pairs of corrective mirrors that countered the effects of the flaw.
Edwin Hubble changed the way we thought of the Universe forever. When scientists decided to name the Hubble Space Telescope after him, they could not have made a more appropriate choice.