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The Hubble Space Telescope was named after astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble (1889–1953), who made some of the most important discoveries in modern astronomy. In the 1920s, making use of relationships established by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Dr. Hubble showed that some of the numerous distant, faint clouds of light in the universe were actually entire galaxies — much like our own Milky Way. The realization that the Milky Way is only one of many galaxies forever changed the way humanity views our place in the universe. But perhaps his greatest discovery came in 1929, when Hubble determined that the farther a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it appears to move away. This notion of an expanding universe formed the basis of the big bang theory, which states that the universe began with an intense burst of energy at a single moment in time and has been expanding ever since.
When launched, the primary objectives of the Hubble Space Telescope were to
- investigate the constitution, physical characteristics, and dynamics of celestial bodies
- determine the nature of processes occurring in stellar and galactic objects
- study the history and evolution of the universe
- confirm universality of physical laws
- provide a long-term space research facility for optical astronomy
Hubble was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery (STS-31) on April 24, 1990. It was deployed into orbit the following day, April 25, 1990.
Hubble was serviced on-orbit five times by astronauts aboard the space shuttle. They rendezvoused with the telescope and placed it in the shuttle’s payload bay to complete the servicing. Below are the names and dates of the servicing missions:
- Servicing Mission 1 (STS-61): December 1993
- Servicing Mission 2 (STS-82): February 1997
- Servicing Mission 3A (STS-103): December 1999
- Servicing Mission 3B (STS-109): March 2002
- Servicing Mission 4 (STS-125): May 2009