Silver Anniversary For Hubble Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope marked its silver anniversary with a picture featuring a spectacular clusters of stars.

15:03 24 April 2015

Hubble Telescope, which was launched on Space Shuttle Discovery on 24 April, 1990 marked its silver anniversary with a picture that features a spectacular vista of young stars blazing across a dense cloud of gas and dust. The cluster of stars is located 20,000 years away in the constellation Carina. 

 

Nasa Administrator Charlie Bolden said: "Even the most optimistic person to whom you could have spoken back in 1990 couldn't have predicted the degree to which Hubble would rewrite our astrophysics and planetary science textbooks.” 

"A quarter of a century later, Hubble has fundamentally changed our understanding of our Universe and our place in it."

 

The telescope, which engineers said would work for at least another five years, became famous  after it was found that its primary mirror soon after launch. It was fixed by spacewalking astronauts in 1993, allowing it to produce clearer images. 

 

Ken Sembach, interim deputy director at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said that the telescope is in great shape. 

 

"The instrumentation on Hubble has been getting better with time, in the sense that we've been able to calibrate it better and know more about how the observatory is working,"

 

"It's also worth noting that two of the instruments repaired on the last servicing mission - the Advanced Camera for Surveys, and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph - are both working five years hereafter the servicing mission, which is longer than they worked originally with their original electronics.

 

"And so we have great hope that these two instruments, along with the two that were installed - the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Wide Field Camera 3 - will continue to be operational for several more years."