16 Interesting Facts About the Hubble Space Telescope
- The Hubble Space Telescope is 43.5 feet long and 14 feet wide.
- It weighs more than 11,000 kilograms and costs around 1.5 billion dollars.
- Hubble is nearly the size of a large school bus, but can easily fit into the cargo bay of a space shuttle.
- The telescope was named after the great American astronomer Edwin Hubble. He was the scientist who discovered that the universe was expanding beyond our Milky Way.
- The telescope was launched into space with the help of the space shuttle Discovery on 24th of April, 1990.
- The Hubble Telescope runs on solar power which is provided by two 25-foot solar panels.
- In its 20 years of service, Hubble has made more than 9,30,000 observations and clicked more than 5,70,000 images of 30,000 heavenly bodies.
- Till date, Hubble has made more than 1,10,000 trips around our planet.
- Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 8,700 scientific papers.
- Hubble finishes one complete rotation around the Earth in just 97 minutes with a speed of 28,000 km/h.
- Hubble can observe the faraway galaxies, but it cannot observe the Sun and Mercury, which is too close to the Sun. The intense light from the Sun may damage it.
- Hubble’s images of the wonders of the cosmos are recorded in shades of black and white, not colour. The final colour images are artificially made by the scientists through coloured filters.
- The Hubble Space Telescope is designed in a fashion that it can even be repaired in space by astronauts. So far, it has been repaired four times.
- The Hubble Space Telescope can be used by anyone to study the universe, irrespective of one’s nationality.
- The Hubble Space Telescope is in the final phase of its life. Soon, its vital systems will shut down. It will then re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up sometime between 2019 and 2030.
- The Hubble Space Telescope will be replaced by the James Webb Space Telescope.
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