The Past, Present and Future of the Hubble Space Telescope

Throughout the ages, humans have been looking for a way to see into the past. In the year 1990, astronomers from NASA made this possible. Sending the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit with the space shuttle Discovery, NASA would make historical discoveries beyond their wildest dreams. Earlier this year they discovered a galaxy approximately 13 billion light years from Earth. Viewing the object at 750 million years after the big bang, scientists have looked into a time shortly after the "Dark Ages," a time before the first galaxies and quasars were formed. This incredible discovery was made with the aid of a cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2218. Being as massive as it is, Abell 2218 bends and amplifies any light that passes through it, working as a natural telescope ("Hubble"). The Hubble Space Telescope has become a great and valuable astronomic tool that NASA says is too costly and dangerous to keep running, a decision that may be premature.

Originally planned to launch in 1986, the Hubble Space Telescope has seen its share of problems. Starting with the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, the Hubble's birth into space was delayed four years (Raven). On April 24, 1990, NASA put the telescope into orbit, only to discover that its primary mirror had a systematic aberration. To fix the problem, a mission in December 1993 set out on the space shuttle Endeavor.

The astronauts of the Endeavor replaced the High Speed Photometer with the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR). This device was designed to correct the aberration of the primary mirror. Even before the Endeavor mission, the space telescope produced many interesting images and was much more accurate than any Earth telescope. With the lack of atmosphere, the HST can look at objects at an angular distance of only 0.05 arcs second apart. The traditional ground-based telescopes can only resolve images about 0.5 arcs second apart, even under perfect sky conditions. With the new improvements, the HST could perform at the level for which it was designed. It could more accurately calculate the rate at which a galaxy is "receding from the Milky Way as a function of their distance" (qtd. in "Hubble"). For those confused by that statement: the HST would take a picture of a galaxy at one point and three seconds later (or any other given amount of time) take another picture of the galaxy and measure how much farther away it is.