It's up there right now -- flying about 340 miles over the Earth. It's a telescope -- in the sky. It's called the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope itself is not really much to look at. If you could see it right now you might think it's just a big bucket with two solar arms. It's about the size of a school bus and weighs about as much as two elephants.
But that silver bucket is pure gold for astronomers. It's made such a big impact that NASA, the space agency takes amazing pictures, calls Hubble the "most significant advance in astronomy since Galileo's telescope. Hubble didn't start out winning high marks in the beginning. It was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the space shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The next day it was released into space, but scientists soon realized they had a big problem. The telescope's primary mirror had a flaw. Hubble became a late-night talk show joke. But in December of 1993 shuttle Endeavour astronauts repaired the telescope. The late-night jokes stopped.
So why is Hubble so special? Because it's on what NASA calls "the ultimate mountaintop." Sitting high above Earth's atmosphere, far away from our light-polluted cities and hovering far away from clouds and storms -- Hubble has a good view of the universe.
Scientists have used it to make observations about planets, stars, galaxies and to show parts of our universe we didn't know existed. The telescope has made more than 1 million observations and astronomers have used Hubble data in more than 12,700 scientific papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built.
Eventually, Hubble will stop working. NASA had hoped to use a space shuttle to bring it home for a museum exhibit. Now, it appears NASA will have to come up with a plan to help its superstar telescope fall back to Earth and fall into the sea. Hubble fans hope that date is far into the future, but NASA already has plans to send up a new space-based instrument, the James Webb Space Telescope, in 2018.
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