The Hubble Space Telescope (HST), or just Hubble, is a space telescope that orbits outside Earth’s atmosphere, in a circular orbit around our planet at 593 km above sea level, with an orbital period between 96 and 97 min.
Named in honor of astronomer Edwin Hubble, it was placed in orbit on April 24, 1990, in the STS-31 mission and as a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency inaugurating the Great Observatories program.
The telescope can obtain images with an optical resolution higher than 0.1 seconds of arc.
The benefit of having a telescope placed beyond the distortion produced by the Earth’s atmosphere is that this way, we can eliminate the effects of atmospheric turbulence, in turn obtaining better images.
In addition, the atmosphere strongly absorbs electromagnetic radiation at certain wavelengths, especially in the infrared, decreasing the quality of the images and making it impossible to acquire spectra in certain bands characterized by the absorption of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Terrestrial telescopes are also affected by meteorological factors (presence of clouds) and light pollution caused by large urban settlements, which reduces the functionality of ground-based telescopes.
Here are a couple of facts about Hubble:
At the moment of being launched, it was the size of a four-story building, 13 meters long and 4 meters in diameter, and weighing more than 12 tons.
The most sophisticated camera of the Hubble Space Telescope has created a mosaic image of a large piece of the sky, which includes at least 10,000 galaxies.
The Hubble is located at 593 km above sea level.
With the Hubble Space Telescope, approximately one million objects have been observed. In comparison, the human eye can only see about 6000 stars with the naked eye.
The observations of the HST, about 500,000 photographs, occupy 1420 optical discs of 6.66 GB.
Hubble orbits the Earth at about 28,000 km / h, 10 circling our planet approximately every 97 minutes.
In spite of the great speed at which the Earth orbits, the telescope is able to point to a star with high precision (the deviation is less than the thickness of a human hair seen at a distance of one and a half kilometers).
Hubble has an index with the detailed position of 15 million stars (catalog H.G.S.C. or Hubble Guide Star Catalog) that allows it to aim at different cosmic targets with great precision.
The total distance that the Hubble has traveled around the Earth is about 3,000 million kilometers, which is more than a one-way trip to Neptune.
Astronomers from more than 45 countries have published discoveries made with Hubble in 4800 scientific articles.
So, without further ado, here are the most fascinating images ever taken by Hubble. Enjoy.
