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. Since launch, Hubble has overcome its troubled beginnings to perform innumerable science observations that have revolutionized humanity’s understanding of the universe. From determining the age of the universe to observing dramatic changes on celestial bodies in our own solar system, Hubble has become one of humanity’s greatest scientific instruments. It was designed as a general purpose observatory, meant to explore the universe in visible, ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. To date, the telescope has studied more than 40,000 cosmic objects, providing views astronomers were unable to capture from the ground. Above is a photo of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The “first light” image from Hubble was taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera to assist in focusing the telescope. The image illustrated Hubble’s improved resolution compared to ground-based observatories, showing that its images were roughly 50 percent sharper than ground-based images. NASA announced that Hubble’s primary mirror had an imperfection called spherical aberration, which affected the clarity of the telescope’s images. The curvature of the mirror was off by 2 microns, or 1/50th the width of a human hair, making images slightly blurry. Above is the lastest photo of the "first light," the central region of the Carina Nebula.
Astronomers unveiled the Legacy Deep Field, the largest portrait of the distant universe ever assembled with the Hubble Space Telescope. Covering an area of sky almost as wide as that spanned by the Full Moon, the image combines 7,500 separate Hubble exposures taken over 16 years and contains roughly 265,000 galaxies stretching across 13.3 billion years of cosmic history. The Legacy Deep Field is shown above.
Hubble completed its 100,000th orbit in space. It took a little over 18 years for the telescope to achieve this many orbits. To commemorate this milestone, Hubble imaged a star-forming nebula in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is pictured above.