How Hubble Space Telescope played its role in space discoveries?
After decades of planning, the HeliSpace Telescope (Hubble Space Telescope) was launched into a 381-mile orbit around the Earth on April 24, 1990 by the Shuttle Discovery. Weighing 12 tons and the size of a car, it was the largest body to be dropped into space. It was named after Edwin Powell Hubble.
Born in 1889, Edwin Powell Hubble was an American astronomer. He discovered some of the most common stars in Andromeda (other than the Nova), including the Cepheid, with the newly built reflection telescope in 1923.
The atmosphere blocks a significant portion of the visible, ultraviolet and infrared rays emitted by celestial bodies, and they fade away. Being at an altitude, this telescope manages to create parts of the spectrum of astronomical objects that were not possible on Earth. With the help of the Hubble telescope, it is possible to make 10 times clearer spectrum than the instruments on the ground.
So with the help of Hubble, space can be seen farther and farther away. Remote cozers ( Quasi Stellar radio sources) that could not be seen from the ground were observed through this telescope. It also made it possible to make indirect and direct observations of the formation of new stars in the black hole in our galaxy.
Due to a technical error called Hubble's Spherical Aberration, it could not detect visible light with the expected clarity. Then, due to the sunlight, 15 to 20% of the images sent by it were blurred. Despite this, Hubble sent information that was not previously available during the first two years. It pointed to a glowing halo of gas around the supernova falling into a large magnetic cloud. One of the images sent by it discovered a dark area in the center of the Galaxy M51 that could be the area around a black hole. Plans are being made to rectify the shortcomings of this telescope.
Although Hubble is not the first space telescope, it has played an important role in public relations for the science of space and is generally known to the general public. It is one of the largest space telescopes and the most important asset for space research. Hubble is a joint venture between the US space agency NASA and the European Space Agency. Hubble is the only space telescope that astronauts can repair in orbit and improve performance with new components. Hubble has been repaired four times so far.
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Hubble has marked so much the image we have from space that we cannot even imagine. And its adventure is great, being able to service a spacecraft made it so paradigmatic of the conquest of space by humankind.
A "not-so-fun" story that not everyone knows is that Hubble was sent to space but because of a design fault, the telescope was myopic. From 1990 to 1993 the images were somehow corrected via data processing and a corrective system was installed by a crew that reached the spacecraft on board of the space shuttle