The Journey of Hubble space telescope | Discoveries of Hubble space telescope | Information about Hubble space telescope

The great Hubble space telescope stands in the first place when compared to all other telescopes ever built by humans. It entirely changed our view towards the Universe. It revealed us the science behind the stars, galaxies, nebulas and more by capturing images of them.

The Hubble space telescope is named after the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble. In 19th century, astronomers assembled many ground based telescopes to observe the Universe, but sunlight in day time and moon light, clouds, climatic conditions in the night time effected them. Due to these reasons astronomers got an idea to build the telescopes and send them into the space to explore the Universe more accurately. These telescopes are called the space observatories.

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Image credit: NASA

In late 1900's, NASA in conjunction with ESA started to build Hubble space telescope. After many difficulties, On 24 April 1990 at NASA's Kennedy space centre this Hubble space telescope was launched.

This started the journey of the Hubble space telescope to explore the universe for the first time. It costed NASA and ESA about 4.7 billion dollars to construction and launch.

Primarily it was launched with four basic instruments,

1. Wide field and planetary camera

2. High speed photometer

3. Faint object spectrograph

4. Faint object camera

These instruments were integrated together to observe the UV light, Visible light and Infrared light.

After the successful launch of Hubble space telescope scientists eagerly waited to examine the images captured by it. But scientists were shocked to see the images captured, as they got blurred due to a small defect while manufacturing the main mirror. The defect is so small as a 1/50 part of our hair.

"Since it is the biggest telescope every built by humans, the defect occurred due to the complexity of the mirror used in Hubble space telescope" NASA said.

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Image credit: NASA

After 3 years of research, On 2 Dec 1993, NASA established a new mirror replacing the defected one with the help of 7 astronauts in space itself. This process taken about 5 days for astronauts to repair and replace the defected instruments. Since then, the Hubble space telescope started to explore the Universe in a unique way by capturing sharp images.

It is orbiting earth in space at about 550 kms altitude and orbiting at a velocity of about 27,300 Kms/hour. It completes one revolution in just 95 minutes.

Like we service the instruments that we use, NASA also provide servicing to the Hubble space telescope since 1993.

As we know, the first ever servicing was done on 1993, second on February 1997 replacing 2 instruments with 4 new ones. Later, the 3rd servicing was done in two phases as 3A and 3B in the years 1999 and 2002. The 4th servicing was scheduled on 2005, but due to the Colombia disaster on 2003, it was done on May 2009. Until now, NASA serviced the Hubble space telescope for 4 times in the process of integrating advanced technology.

It consists of two solar panels which are 24 feet apart, making Sun as a source of energy to run.

What it discovered?

One of major images that changed our view towards the Universe was captured by Hubble, known as Hubble deep field & Hubble ultra-deep field.

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Image credit: NASA/JPL/STScI Hubble Deep Field Team

The Hubble deep field is an image taken in a small part in the constellation of Ursa Major which is for 10 days long (18 to 28 December, 1995). The region is so small as 1/20 million part of the space around us. This image shows stars and more than 3000 galaxies which are in young stages.

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Image credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team

The Hubble ultra-deep field is an image taken in a small part in the constellation of Fornax on 24 September 2003 to 16 January 2004. Hubble observed this region for a total of 4 months to collect data and capture this image. It is estimated that this image has 10,000 galaxies in it. Estimations also revealing that these galaxies in the Hubble ultra-deep field image may have formed 0.8 billion years after big bang.

From this Hubble ultra-deep field image, extreme deep field and ABYSS deep field images are made, by gathering some more information through observations.

Hubble space telescope also revealed the age of the Universe and rate of expansion of the Universe. It is possible because of the cepheid variable stars. These stars rapidly changes size and temperatures causing the brightness to increase or decrease. Every galaxy consists of these type of stars, which can be tracked easily by Hubble and helps us in calculating the distance and velocity of the galaxies.

By these calculations, scientists made some estimations about the age of Universe, rate of expanding of Universe after the big bang and concluded that the Universe may have an age about 13.8 billion years. Before the launch of Hubble, scientists thought that universe may have an age about 10 to 20 billion years.

It not only studied about the galaxies but also studied about the stars and their evolutions to know the science behind them. It also revealed some of the interesting facts about our neighbour galaxies like Andromeda galaxy, Magellanic clouds and more. It also taken the images of the Exoplanets, in which the first one was captured in the year 2004 through visible light known as Fomalhaut, is 25 light years away from Earth. Later, it took images of the many other exoplanets too.

Hubble_Reveals_Fomalhaut_Into_the_dark_space

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and P. Kalas (University of California, Berkeley and SETI Institute)

Through its journey until now, it also captured the high resolution images of the different celestial objects in our own solar system. So, we can examine them very precisely.

Until 1960's scientists thought that a super massive black hole sits at very centre of every galaxy, later Hubble observations confirmed it. It observed that stars at the middle of each galaxy are orbiting around an uneven object which is not visible concluding as a super massive black hole.

On March 2019, ESA taken data about our own Milky Way galaxy from Hubble. From this upgraded data, it is estimated that Milky Way weighs approximately 1.5 trillion Solar mass units and has a radius of about 1,29,000 light years. Previously, it is thought to be Milky Way may weighs between 500 billion to 3 trillion times the Sun's mass.

In exploration of the Universe, Hubble played a major role since its launch in 1990.

Until now, Hubble made more than 1.3 million observations and recorded them on more than 15,000 papers. In which, 200 papers are releasing to public every year.

Hubble captured many images in the Universe, including popular images like Pillars of creation in Eagle Nebula, Crab Nebula, Orion Nebula, NGC 1015, Galaxy clusters, tracked black holes and many more. We will discuss them in next article.

Scientists are expecting that Hubble space telescope may expire in between 2030 to 2040, but a new observatory which is the son of Hubble space telescope joining the great observatories soon called "James Webb space telescope". To know about James Webb space telescope click here.

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