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). With this powerful telescope, he saw stars near the edge of Andromeda, and he reasoned that Andromeda was a galaxy in its own right. He proved that galaxies, composed of stars and planets, exist beyond our own Milky Way. He also proved that they are distributed almost uniformly in every direction.
As Hubble continued his study, he discovered that the universe is expanding. The more distant a galaxy is from Earth, the more its light is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum -- redshifted. In 1929 he determined that the more distant the galaxy from Earth, the greater its redshift, and the faster it appears to move away. Known as Hubble's Law, this discovery is the foundation of the Big Bang theory. The theory states that the universe began after a cataclysmic event in which it underwent a rapid period of inflation. The movement of the galaxies away from us is the continuation of that motion. Hubble's discovery is considered one of the greatest triumphs of 20th century astronomy. However, confirmation was difficult, until the launch of the HST.
With the telescope in orbit, astronomers are getting a picture of the universe clearer than anything they could previously obtain.
