A View From Orbit: The Hubble Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope still flies in Earth orbit, taking high-resolution photographs of stars, galaxies, nebula, asteroids, planets — pretty much anything astronomers decide merits Hubble’s time.
Hubble was delivered to its station by the Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990 — 35 years ago today. It’s expected to operate through at least 2026 and possibly even beyond.
A Long, Troubled Path To Orbit
The idea of putting a telescope into orbit — where its view wouldn’t be distorted by disturbances in the atmosphere — dates back to a German physicist and rocket engineer, who proposed such a thing in 1923. In addition to being out of reach of the air turbulence that makes stars seem to twinkle, an orbital telescope would also be able to observe infrared and ultraviolet light. Both are absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere.
In 1965, NASA began studying what it would take to put an observatory into orbit. In addition to the numerous technical hurdles, funding was in short supply: In 1974, Congress cut what little funding the project had received so far. Four years later, NASA had obtained funding from Congress and from the European Space Agency and aimed for a launch date of 1983.
But that date slid time and time again as development of the space shuttle program dragged on. NASA hoped to launch the Hubble in late 1986, but the Challenger disaster brought the shuttle program to a halt for several months.
Even after the shuttle Discovery finally placed Hubble into orbit in April 1990, scientists found right away they weren’t getting the pictures they had expected. The telescope’s 7.9-foot-
wide primary mirror had been polished to the wrong shape — off by 2 microns, or one-fiftieth the width of a human hair.
A Few of Hubble's Most Outstanding Photos
Pillars of Creation
January 1995
This is M16, or the Eagle Nebula, 7,000 light-years away. Dense clouds of hydrogen gas and dust are bombarded with ultraviolet light from newborn stars. The longest pillar, on the left, is about four light- years tall. The fingerlike protrusions at the top of the clouds are larger than our solar system.
Hubble Deep Field
January 1996
This image was constructed from 276 pictures made over 10 days. It shows up to 10,000 galaxies: “Likely to be the most distant ever seen,” astronomers said at the time. Some of the galaxies in the picture are up to 12 billion light-years away. Astronomers were transfixed by the array of shapes and colors of various galaxies in this photo.
Black Eye Galaxy
February 2004
This is galaxy M64, commonly called the Black Eye Galaxy. Most of the stars rotate clockwise around the center of this galaxy, but a layer of light-absorbing dust in the foreground is rotating counterclockwise, suggesting this might be the result of a collision of two galaxies more than a billion years ago.
Crab Nebula
December 2005
This image of the famous Crab Nebula — the aftermath stretching six light-years- wide of a star that went supernova in 1054 — is made from 24 individual exposures made over a 14-month span. The orange bits are hydrogen, remnants of the dead star. The blue light comes from a rapidly spinning neutron star in the center of the debris.
Ring Nebula
September 2011
The glowing remains of a sunlike star, the Ring Nebula, are about 2,000 light-years away and measure about a light-year across. The deep blue area in the center is composed of helium, while the cyan area is hydrogen and oxygen and the orange is nitrogen and sulfur. The tiny white dot in the center is the hot core of the nebula, a white dwarf star.
Monkey Head Nebula
March 2014
NGC 2174 — better known as the Monkey Head Nebula — is a birthing area for stars 6,400 light-years away. Newly formed stars on the right blast the cloud of hydrogen gas and dust with ultraviolet light, which carves the dust into pillars. As the gas warms, it begins to glow at infrared wavelengths.
Jupiter and its Moons
February 2015
Hubble made this image of the moons of Jupiter casting shadows on the planet below. At the upper right is the heavily volcanic moon Io, but the shadow just below Io is the shadow of Callisto — which is the darker object at lower left. The shadow near Callisto is of Europa, just out of the frame at lower left.
Space Ghost
October 2019
No, this is not a special effect from a Marvel Comics movie. This is known as Arp-Madore 2026-424. The “eyes” of this creature are galaxies, which slammed into each other at some time in the past. The blue areas in the “face” are clumps of young, hot stars. The fact that the result of this collision looks like an alien head is purely a coincidence. It’s hoped.
