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Hubble Space Telescope 30th Launchiversary

The Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its 30th anniversary on Friday. It has been called the greatest scientific instrument in history.

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The Hubble Space Telescope is as big as a school bus
By
Tony Rice
, NASA Ambassador

30 years ago today, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-31) from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39B in Florida. It was deployed the following day by astronauts Loren Shriver, Bruce McCandless II, Kathryn Sulliva, Steven Hawley and Charlie Bolden, who later serve as NASA administrator for eight ears.

The idea behind HST was born more than a decade before the first artifical satellite was launched. Lyman Spitzer, Jr.'s 1946 paper described the advantages telescopes operating above the Earth's atmosphere. Early design work began in the mid 70s, Congress approved funding in 1977 and construction began the following year.

NASA planned to launch HTS in 1986 but the grounding of the space shuttle following the loss of the Challenger that year pushed the launch date to 1990.

Over the next 19 years, shuttle missions would visit the telescope five times, Initially to repair flawed optics. The Wide Field Planetary Camera, Spectrometer, and gyroscopes used in pointing the telescope were each upgraded twice. The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), Solar Arrays, and their controllers were also replaced along with the data recorders which were upgraded with Solid State technology with ten times the capacity. A backup Reaction Wheel Assembly used in pointing the telscope was added to extend its life.

"If you had two fireflies six feet apart in Tokyo, Hubble's vision with ACS will be so fine that it will be able to tell from Washington [D.C.] that they were two different fireflies instead of one," according to Holland Ford, leader of the team that built the upgraded ACS and professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University.

When astronaut Andrew J. Feustel visited the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in 2015, he commented on the repairing the bus sized telscope in space. He recalled the checklist of tasks, but most vividly rememebered the view of Earth.

The space shuttle flew at it's highest altitude, nearly 400 miles (the International Space Station orbits at around 250 miles) while deploying and servcing the telescope.

The Hubble Space Telescope is as big as a school bus

Hubble Space Telescope Facts

  • 43.5 feet long (13.2 m) about the size of a school bus.
  • Weighs 24,500 lb (11,110 kg), the equivalent of 2-3 African elephants
  • The primary and secondary mirrors weigh 1852 lbs
  • Resolution is about 10 times better than even larger, ground-based telescopes.
  • Capable of resolving a dime from a distance of 86 miles (0.05 arcsecond)
  • Capable of locking onto observing targets without deviating more than .007 arc seconds. ]This is like standing in Raleigh and holding a laser pointer steady on a dime in Jacksonville, Florida (400 miles away)
  • The power needed to run the telescope is a lot less than you might think, arround 3,000 watts of power usage. A hair dryer requires about 1,800 watts.
  • Hubble orbits the Earth at a cruising speed of 17,000 miles per hour.
  • Hubble generates 3-4 gigabytes of data per day.
  • Hubble has observed locations more than 13.4 billion light years away
  • Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 15,000 papers.

Day to day operations

Hubble is commanded from the Space Telescope Operations Control Center (STOCC) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. A team of technicians and scientists are responsible for the health, safety and performance of the spacecraft.

Power, thermal, data management, pointing control, flight software development, sustaining engineering of the control center hardware and software, and systems administration of the network and ground system components also also developed and tested there before uploading to the telescope.

Learn more

North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences astrophysicists Rachel Smith and Patrick Treuthardt to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Hubble Space Telescope with a talk at noon.

You can see the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) pass over. It orbits closer to the equator than the International Space Station (ISS) so will appear closer to the horizon from North Carolina.  The bus sized HST is also much smaller than the football field sized ISS and much dimmer as a result.

The next opportunity to see HST is May 7 at 4:36 am. The best upcoming opportunity is May 11 at 5:30 am when it will be visible through the southern sky as it passes over central Florida.

 Credits 

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