Hubble Space Telescope turns 25, still going strong
GREENBELT, Md. — The Hubble Space Telescope, 340 miles above Earth, turns 25 today, but no one should call it old. It’s mature. It’s the great silverback of astronomy, grizzled from wear and tear, and yet still powerful and utterly dominant in its field.
The Hubble changed our understanding of the age of the universe, the evolution of galaxies and the expansion of space itself. Along the way it has had the equivalent of knee and hip replacement surgery: Five times, astronauts on the space shuttle paid a visit to swap out old batteries and install new instruments, including, in 2009, the best camera the telescope has ever had.
“It’s fantastic. It’s better than ever. That’s not just hype, it’s the truth,” said Jennifer Wiseman, the senior project scientist for the Hubble at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“This is 1970s technology, and it is still, after 25 years, the most powerful scientific instrument in the world,” said astrophysicist Patrick McCarthy of the Giant Magellan Telescope under constructioni n Chile.
NASA on Thursday marked the silver anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope with fireworks, of a celestial kind, conveyed by the orbiting observatory itself.
To commemorate Hubble's launch on April 24, 1990, NASA selected a picture of a stellar nursery located about 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina.
“This is really an exciting week for astronomers and people who love astronomy all over the world,” said Ms. Wiseman at a televised anniversary celebration at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
But despite all the celebrations this week, Hubble’s fate is cloudy. The great telescope is essentially stranded in space.
The Hubble was designed to be serviced by the space shuttle. But the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, and the Hubble hasn’t had a repair job since that 2009 mission. At some point, under the laws of entropy that dominate the cosmos, the Hubble will begin to deteriorate — for example, losing its navigational ability as its gyroscopic sensors fail one by one.
NASA said this week that, based on current orbital projections, the Hubble is expected to reenter the atmosphere “around 2037.” The telescope has no means of propulsion.