Once the telescope gathers the data, its computers turn the information into long strings of numbers that are beamed to @Earth as radio signals. This information streams through a series of satellite relays to the @Goddard Space Flight Center in @Greenbelt, @Maryland. Then it travels by telephone line to the Space Telescope Science Institute in @Baltimore. It is there that the numbers are converted back into pictures and useful data for study.
The Hubble Space Telescope is named for astronomer @Edwin P. Hubble. As a young boy, Hubble read tales of traveling to undersea cities and journeying to the center of the Earth. These stories by adventure novelists stoked young Hubble's imagination of faraway places. He fulfilled those childhood dreams by becoming an astronomer, exploring distant galaxies with telescopes, and developing theories that changed the field of astronomy.
But Hubble didn't settle immediately on astronomy as a career. He first studied law as a @Rhodes @Scholar at Queens College in @Oxford, @England. A year after passing the bar exam, Hubble realized that his love of exploring the stars was greater than his attraction to law. He therefore abandoned law and studied astronomy at the University of @Chicago, where he completed his doctoral thesis in 1917.
Using the largest telescope of its day, Hubble looked far into space to study the @Andromeda nebula (which we now call the Andromeda Galaxy or @M31).
