The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Pioneer Outer Space Observatory

Credit NASA

Humanity always tries to explore the universe far away beyond the limit of vision. To achieve this goal, racing each other to develop space probes that fetch visuals of the far galaxies, nebulas, meteoroids etc., in front of human eyes.

Credit NASA

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is the first sophisticated optical observatory placed outer to explore the celestials by capturing the light emitted or reflected by them. The HST was set in space 600 kilometres above the Earth, far above the atmosphere of Earth. This help HST gathers much more light to develop brighter and clear images of celestial objects. The motive behind the outer space telescope considers the elimination of the atmosphere obstruction, which challenges better and more precise imaging.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) got the authority to develop a telescope from the U.S congress in 1977, named after the foremost American astronomer of the 20th century, Edwin Hubble. HST was deployed from the Space Shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990.

HST is laid out in a Cassegrain telescope design with an object/primary mirror size of about 94 inches/ 2.4 meters and a secondary mirror of 12 inches. The wide-field planetary camera can take wide-field, high-resolution images of celestial objects by grabbing ultraviolet and infrared lights to develop a 10-time bigger picture than any telescope on the Earth. With this type of technology, the light of celestial object is captured by the primary mirror and reflected faint-object camera via a secondary mirror, which HST enable to capture the ultraviolet light, which is relatively impossible on Earth due to the atmosphere.

One month after the launch, it was noticed that the HST had the wrong spherical shape of the primary mirror. The images were produced fuzzy/blurry rather than crisp or sharp because of spherical aberration. It also had a noticeable issue in gyroscope and solar-power arrays. From December 2, 1993, to December 13, 1993, the NASA mission, Endeavour, sought the HST problem in 5 spacewalks. The astronauts fixed the primary mirror issue by replacing the wide-field planetary camera and installing a new device consisting of 10 mirrors to correct the light path reflected from the primary mirror.

When HST started its whole potential operation, it returned spectacular photographs of various cosmic marvels. The Hubble Space Telescope is Pioneer Outer Space Observatory which observed About 13.4 Billion Light Years far galaxy GN-z11. Some of them are showcased below.

 

Credit NASA

HST was further repaired through subsequent missions in 1997, 1999 and 2002 and fixed the issue in the gyroscope, planetary camera and other equipment. The HST was supposed to word up to 2021 till the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).