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Hubble Space Telescope

Hubble Space Telescope



Hubble Space Telescope
This photograph of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was taken on the fourth servicing mission to the observatory in 2009.
Credits: NASA
From the dawn of humankind to a mere 400 years ago, all that we knew about our universe came through observations with the naked eye. Then Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens in 1610. The world was in for an awakening.
Saturn, we learned, had rings. Jupiter had moons. That nebulous patch across the center of the sky called the Milky Way was not a cloud but a collection of countless stars. Within but a few years, our notion of the natural world would be forever changed. A scientific and societal revolution quickly ensued.

Edwin Hubble
The Hubble Space Telescope is named in honor of astronomer Edwin Hubble.

Hubble Facts

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope was launched April 24, 1990, on the space shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 
  • Hubble has made more than 1.3 million observations since its mission began in 1990.
  • Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 15,000 scientific papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built.
  • Hubble does not travel to stars, planets or galaxies. It takes pictures of them as it whirls around Earth at about 17,000 mph.
  • Hubble has traveled more than 4 billion miles along a circular low Earth orbit currently about 340 miles in altitude.
  • Hubble has no thrusters. To change pointing angles, it uses Newton’s third law by spinning its wheels in the opposite direction. It turns at about the speed of a minute hand on a clock, taking 15 minutes to turn 90 degrees.
  • Hubble has the pointing accuracy of .007 arc seconds, which is like being able to shine a laser beam focused on Franklin D. Roosevelt's head on a dime roughly 200 miles away.
  • Outside the haze of our atmosphere, Hubble can see astronomical objects with an angular size of 0.05 arc seconds, which is like seeing a pair of fireflies in Tokyo from your home in Maryland.
  • Hubble has peered back into the very distant past, to locations more than 13.4 billion light years from Earth.
  • The Hubble archive contains more than 140 terabytes, and Hubble science data processing generates about 10 terabytes of new archive data per year. 
  • Hubble's primary mirror is 2.4 meters (7 feet, 10.5 inches) across.




With a 2.4-meter (7.9 ft) mirror, Hubble's four main instruments observe in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared spectra. Hubble's orbit outside the distortion of Earth's atmosphere allows it to take extremely high-resolution images, with substantially lowerbackground light than ground-based telescopes. Hubble has recorded some of the most detailed visible light images ever, allowing a deep view into space and time. Many Hubble observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, such as accurately determining the rate of expansion of the universe.




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