Hubble’s great legacy

Thirty years of data, images from space telescope

When it was launched by the Space Shuttle Discovery 30 years ago last month, we had high hopes, but we could not know then what the Hubble Space Telescope would bring us.

At first, it seemed, all Hubble brought was woes. The first highly anticipated images returned from the telescope were out of focus, thanks to a minute flaw with a mirror. Three years later, spacewalking astronauts replaced the faulty mirror, restoring Hubble’s capacity to take eye-popping and clear images.

With the problem of blurry images fixed, Hubble began delivering images and data that provided breakthroughs in our understanding of everything from black holes to dark matter and the age of the universe itself.

The telescope’s namesake, Edwin Hubble, attempted in the early 1900s to determine the age of the universe by measuring how it was expanding. Thanks to the telescope named in his honor, astronomers have been able to more precisely calculate that age — about 13.8 billion years.

More than 4,000 astronomers have availed themselves of data from Hubble to write more than 12,700 scientific papers.

Even nonscientists are likely familiar with Hubble’s work in the form of breathtaking images never before seen. Hubble has been able to capture the birth of stars, far-flung galaxies and the Crab Nebula, among other sights.

And now, 30 years after it began its ambitious undertaking, Hubble Space Telescope is nearing the end of its mission. Scientists are readying its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, for launch in the near future.

Hubble has been one of the most successful space-exploration projects in history. Its contributions to our understanding of the universe have gone beyond even what many had hoped for when it left Earth in 1990. It’s a proud legacy of discovery.