25 years ago, on April 24, 1990, was put into orbit orbital telescope “Hubble”. His contribution to science is invaluable – 1.2 million targeted observations for 38,000 facilities will expand the boundaries of knowledge of the universe. Based on these studies was written 13,000 scientific papers.
The official photo of the 25th anniversary of the telescope: star cluster Westerlund 2, and the gas cloud Gum 29. © NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA), A. Nota (ESA / STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team
The real pride of NASA specialists – the telescope is able to direct the camera to an object with a precision laser beam aimed at a coin from a distance of 350 kilometers. Currently, it weighs 12.2 tons, length – 13.3 meters, diameter mirror – 2.4 meters. During the day, the telescope makes 16 revolutions around the planet, its “mileage” for 25 years amounted to about 5 billion miles.
During the work to him several times sent to the service of the mission, during which repairs and improvement of equipment. The telescope is still in good working condition and, according to experts, will last another 5 years. Thanks to the “Hubble” has been done a lot of amazing discoveries and formulated many new theories – scientists have received information about the objects located at a distance of 13.4 billion light years from Earth, specified the age of the universe and even suggested the number of galaxies are in it (about 200 billion) .
The archive “Hubble” more than 100 terabytes of data, its management leads Center Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, a scientific program – Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
The telescope is named after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who made many discoveries, including the expansion of the universe to formulate hypotheses.
In addition, now in orbit American Observatory “Chandra”, “Spitzer” and Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope.
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