Hubble Space Telescope: Eyes Away From Earth

June 13, 2021

The Pillars of Creation

Do you think that we can see nearby or far planets, stars and galaxies with our small household telescopes or the giant ones on top of mountains. No we can’t. Do you know why? Well it is because of our atmosphere. Even though our atmosphere provides us with safety from UV and Infrared rays, the atmosphere blurs out a lot of stars and galaxies. So to resolve this issue, mankind developed its first telescope that would be placed outside the atmosphere. This telescope is the famous Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24 1990. For the past 31 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has been providing us with images of objects that we never imagined existed.

Lyman Spitzer

Just after WW2, Lyman Spitzer, an American Physicist proposed the idea of a telescope which would operate in the Space and would avoid the blurring of our atmosphere. His document was called the 'Advantages of an Extraterrestrial Observatory'. It took a few decades for this idea to gain popularity. In these decades, Lyman created a committee to create the space telescope. So in 1971, Lyman and his committee went to NASA to make their dreams come true. NASA had also been working to create a space telescope. After years of research and work, the project was finally ready. The telescope was scheduled to be launched in 1983 but due to some difficulties the project was postponed to 1986. Although in 1986, the Challenger project failed and ended up killing all of the crew onboard. The project was again rescheduled to 1990 and in this year the telescope was finally launched and it was carried by the Spacecraft Discoverer.

When the Hubble Space Telescope finally reached its destination, the telescope encountered an issue with its lenses as it was sending blurry images. To resolve this issue with its lenses, NASA sent its first Service Mission in 1993 wherein the lenses were fixed and NASA finally received the Hubble's first clear images and those images were very beautiful. Humanity saw Nebulae, Black Holes, Supernovae, Stars and many celestial bodies up so close for the very first time in history. This was a big achievement for whole of mankind.

NASA had sent 3 other similar servicing missions in year 1997, 2002, 2009. The goals for these servicing missions was to carry out repairs and upgrades of hardware and software. With these final upgrades, Hubble's life has been extended till year 2040.

Hubble Space Telescope

This telescope is so powerful that it can zoom up to 10 – 15 billion light years! The telescope was named after the American astronomer Edwin P Hubble. Edwin Hubble is the one who proved that the universe is expanding. The telescope just takes about 96 minutes to revolve around the Earth at the speed of 8 km/s or 28800 km/hr !. This telescope is 550 km far from the Earth’s surface in the Low Earth Orbit. It weighs around 12 tons and is 14.5 m long. The project to construct this masterpiece required 2.5 billion dollars and at that time it was a huge amount and that is the reason why it took so much time for it to get implemented. The Hubble Space Telescope was constructed by a team of Astronomers, Astrophysicists, Electricians and Mechanics from both the European Space Agency and NASA. Even after the availability of adequate funds, this masterpiece of science took 19 years for it to be constructed.

The spaceship for transport was designed by Lockheed Martin and the lenses for telescope were designed by Perkin-Elmer. The Hubble's target for images is controlled by Space Telescope Science Institute and its revolution around the Earth is controlled by the Godard Space Center.

Some more information on the Hubble

1. The Hubble Space Telescope has a way to capture images of black holes. It observes stars with unusually more mass and velocity. These stars usually explain that a black hole is nearby.

2. The Hubble Space Telescope is powered by solar energy and has two very long solar panels on its sides.

3. The telescope sends 120 gigabytes of information in 1 week. This information is equivalent to 1.2 km of books on a shelf.

Interesting Facts

1. A new telescope is about to be launched this year into space. This telescope is the James Webb telescope. This telescope will be larger, faster, more precise and with a lot of range.

2. The James Webb telescope will be stationed 1.5 million km far from the Earth whereas the Hubble Space Telescope is only 500 km far from the Earth. That is a huge difference.