Imagine having an "eye" on the universe, being able to look out at a distant star or nebula with amazing clarity. With such a telescope, you could peer billions of light years away and see things that happened billions of years ago. Astronomers are doing just that with the Hubble Space Telescope!

Hubble Telescope Image Gallery


Photo courtesy NASA / Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
Credit: NASA, A. Fruchter and the ERO Team (STScI)
The Hubble Space Telescope is deployed from the cargo bay of the space shuttle. See more Hubble Telescope pictures.

What exactly is the Hubble Space Telescope? Why is it so special? How does it produce such amazing images and where can we see them? In this edition of How Stuff Works, we will look closely at this amazing instrument that has revolutionized astronomy!


Photo courtesy NASA
Artist's concept of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The major problem with observing the light from distant stars using ground-based telescopes is that the light must pass through the Earth's atmosphere. Besides clouds and the weather, the Earth's atmosphere is a "boiling" place -- there are dust, currents of warm air rising, currents of cold air falling and water vapor. All of these factors can produce fuzzy images of the stars and limit the usefulness of ground-based telescopes.

In 1946, an astrophysicist named Dr. Lyman Spitzer (1914-1997) proposed that a telescope in space would reveal much clearer images, of even farther-off objects, than any ground-based telescope. This was an outrageous idea considering no one had yet launched a rocket into outer space. As the U.S. space program developed and excelled in the 1960s and 1970s, Spitzer lobbied NASA and Congress to develop a space telescope. In 1975, the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA began developing the space telescope. In 1977, Congress approved funds for the space telescope, and NASA named Lockheed Martin Aerospace Company as the prime contractor to oversee its construction.

In 1983, the space telescope was named after American astronomer Edwin Hubble, whose observations of variable stars in distant galaxies confirmed that the universe was expanding and gave support to the "Big Bang" theory. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) took 8 years to build, held five scientific instruments, had more than 400,000 parts and had 26,000 miles of electrical wiring. HST was reported to be 50 times more sensitive than ground-based telescopes, with 10 times better resolution. After a long delay due to the Challenger disaster, HST went into orbit in 1990.

Learn More on the Discovery Channel
The Hubble Space Telescope uses a system of cameras and mirrors to detect distant star light. Learn how the Hubble sees in this video from the Discovery Channel.
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