Picture a lightning bug. Now imagine that lightning bug is 10,000 miles away and you can still see it. That's Hubble vision. And Hubble vision isn't just about seeing fine detail in space, it's about glimpsing the past. Looking out in space is also like looking back in time.
By detecting light from faint stars a billion light years away the Hubble Space Telescope is actually seeing light emitted by a star one billion years ago.
The Hubble Space Telescope is equipped with a faint object camera provided by the European Space Agency that sees in the visible and ultraviolet spectrum and has helped create the largest inventory of stars ever recorded, the Guidestar Catalogue, which contains information on approximately 19 million objects.
Put into orbit by the shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990, Hubble collects light from stars and other celestial bodies in its primary mirror. The light is then converted into digital radio signals that are relayed through a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite to a ground station at White Sands, New Mexico. Wide field planetary cameras, photometers and spectrographs, like the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph, on Hubble help analyze celestial data.
The Hubble Space Telescope is named for Edwin P. Hubble, the scientist who expanded our horizons with the discovery that the universe extends far beyond the limits of our tiny (universally speaking) Milky Way galaxy. Hubble not only brings to mind the legacy of one great scientist but also reminds us that discoveries by man or machine don't come easy. Hubble's primary mirror was polished too flat by one fiftieth the width of a human hair -- a disastrous error in optical terms that resulted in fuzzy imaging. Space shuttle servicing missions could not replace the primary mirror but were able to install corrective optics to compensate for image blurring.
Even after repairs, however, Hubble's imaging is still plagued by problems -- Earth-circling debris, the planet's magnetic field, radio noise, and atmospheric drag interfere with Hubble's vision. Ultimately, a Moon observatory might be the best solution to overcoming the difficulties of Earth-bound and Earth-orbiting observatories.
