The Hubble Space Telescope was first conceived in the 1940s and initially called the Large Space Telescope. After decades of planning, development and research, Hubble eventually launched on April 24th 1990. Despite a monumental cock-up resulting in blurred images and another multi-billion-dollar mission to resolve this issue, Hubble has now been expanding our knowledge of the universe for over 30 years.
In 1946 a very nice chappy, Lyman Spitzer, first conceived of the idea of space astronomy, understanding that photography in space isn’t subject to the distortions of earth’s atmosphere. And this was before humans had launched any satellites. Clever man. He was also a mountaineer and was the first person to climb Mount Thor in Canada. (A shame it’s not in Norway)
Hubble launched from the space shuttle Discovery with five astronauts and a large quantity of dried, tasteless food. Hubble itself deployed from Discovery on April 25th 1990 and snapped its first image on May 20th. It wasn’t until June 27th that NASA announced ‘spherical aberration’ on the primary mirror. The mirror’s curvature was off by 1/50th the width of a human hair, but that was enough to blur the images. Oops. NASA finally fixed this error in December January 1994. Still, even with a blurry camera, the boffins were able to determine the universe’s age – 13.8 Billion years, give or take an aeon.
After the fix, Hubble became prolific with its achievements including:
- Confirmation of the existence of supermassive black holes (May 1994)
- Watching comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 strike Jupiter (July 1994)
- Discovering oxygen on Europa (1995)
- Discovered the universe’s missing Hydrogen (May 2000) – I hadn’t realised the universe had lost it
- Direct proof of dark matter observed (August 2006)
- First organic molecule detected on an exoplanet (March 2008) – First hint of aliens? This was three years before I joined Twitter
- Discovered that the Milky Way–Andromeda collision was going to be head-on (May 2012) – Don’t worry, this isn’t as bad as it sounds
- In March 2016, Hubble broke the cosmic distance record, taking an image of Galaxy GN-z11 as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, a mere 400 million years after the big bang
- Water vapour detected on a habitable-zone exoplanet K2-18b (September 2019) – We are heading into alien life territory now!
The successor to Hubble is the Webb telescope, but Hubble will continue to be used as Webb uses different capabilities.
So, long may Hubble continue and I look forward to my next visit soon
Yours in space
Alienagogo
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