October 13, 2019
The Hubble telescope was launched by NASA (National
Aeronautics and Space Administration) and ESA (European Space Agency) on April
24, 1990. Space Shuttle Discovery launched it into orbit. The Hubble telescope
orbits approximately 547km above Earth. It travels 5 miles per second and is
solar-powered; hence, it gets energy from the Sun. Hubble takes clear and sharp
images of the celestial bodies in space e.g. planets, stars, galaxies and
nebulae. It can take images of celestial bodies, which are billions of light-years away from us such as the birth and death of stars.
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| Picture Credits: NASA |
According to
NASA, Hubble transmits about 140 gigabytes of science data every week back to
Earth. That's equal to about 45 two-hour, HD-quality movies or about 30,000 mp3
songs. The digital signals are relayed to satellites, then to a ground station,
then to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and finally to the Space Telescope
Science Institute. The STScI (Space Telescope Science Institute) translates the
data into images and information we can understand.
This mission
is a very successful one but many people don’t know a tragedy that happened to
this telescope in 1990, when ‘Spherical aberration’ a flaw in the main mirror occurred and it meant that the telescope couldn't focus properly.
Where Hubble's images should have been razor-sharp, astronomers instead
struggled to make out the fine details of their observations due to the blurred images. A
servicing mission later fixed this flaw in 1993. According to reports, Hubble
is expected to last up to 5 more years.
One of the
greatest images this telescope took was the Hubble deep field, which is an
image of a small region in the Ursa Major constellation.
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| Hubble deep field picture of some galaxies in the universe by NASA |
All the
colorful spots you see are individual galaxies and this makes you wonder just
how big this universe is and how small we are. These galaxies may seem a lot
but they are just the ones from a tiny spot we can see in the sky. You can even
find more Hubble deep field images on NASA and ESA websites. Just to see how
zoomed-in this image is, please watch this video uploaded by NASA:
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