25 Years of The Hubble Telescope......

25 Years of Hubble. One of the most significant projects NASA has accomplished.

http://www.newsquench.com/nasa-to-celebrate-25th-anniversa…/

The NASA Hubble Space Telescope released into Earth orbit by the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990

has made over 1,000,000 observations

has motivated scientists to write over 12,700 scientific papers based on its discoveries

Hubble captured over 570,000 images of 30,000 celestial objects.

it made more than 110,000 trips around the Earth.

Hubble is 13.3 meters long and weighs 24,500 pounds. It has a 2.4 meter primary mirror and generates 10 terabytes of new data every year.

Hubble’s four main instruments observe in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared spectra. The telescope is named after the famous astronomer, Edwin Hubble.

Hubble’s orbit above the Earth’s distorting atmosphere allows astronomers to make the very high resolution observations essential to open new windows onto planets, stars and galaxies. Hubble can access the otherwise invisible ultraviolet part of the spectrum, and also has access to areas of the infrared not visible from the ground.

Hubble could survive into 2020, said NASA.

Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is scheduled for launch in 2018.