The Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched after a two-year delay on April 24th, 1990 from the space shuttle Discovery. This telescope has a length of 13.2 meters and a weight at launch that was 11,110 kg. It is a space-based optical reflective telescope that observes distant and faint objects. (NASA) One of the most important discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope has to be that it has revealed the age of the universe to be 13 to 14 billion years old, this was a huge improvement from the earth based telescopes that had a much larger range of 10 to 20 billion years old. The future of the Hubble Telescope is retirement, the telescope has already outlived its proposed lifespan and the James Webb Space telescope will soon be its successor. There is no return mission planned for the Hubble Space Telescope and it will likely be returned to Earth through a de-orbit mission that will assist the telescope through Earth’s atmosphere into an ocean. (NASA)
The most interesting thing I found out about the Hubble Space Telescope was that immediately after it went into orbit they found out that there was already a problem with the telescope. There was a flaw with the primary mirror called “spherical aberration” due to the mirror being slightly the wrong shape. (NASA) I was very
surprised that this error was not found before the telescope was launched. I am assuming this is because it was such a slight error that it could only be seen while looking at the images that were taken after it was in orbit. I chose the Hubble as one of my topics because I wanted to learn about the older telescope before I looked at the information for the James Webb Space Telescope.
The James Webb Space Telescope has a planned launch date of October 2018.
One significant difference between the James Webb Space Telescope is that this telescope will be an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. Another difference is that the JWST will see further back into the cosmos when the first stars were being formed while the HST can only see as far back to the first galaxies that were formed almost a full billions years less. The reason for this is because this is one of the primary missions of the JWST. (NASA) The wavelength coverage of the JWST is primarily in the infrared range but the full range is from .6 microns to 28.5
microns.
I think the fact that this telescope will see almost as far back as the big bang is pretty fascinating. I can’t imagine the information they will be able to extrapolate from these missions. I will definitely stay tuned into the information NASA will be providing the public once the telescope is in orbit.