One of the most important spacecraft in the history of space exploration started its mission thirty-four years ago

The Hubble Space Telescope has been serving in space for more than three decades and has enriched humanity’s knowledge of the universe with countless valuable recordings, observations and data. The telescope was the most advanced space telescope of its time, launched on April 24, 1990 as part of the STS-31 mission as the first member of the Great Observatories program. The telescope reached its destination aboard Discovery, one of the space shuttles still operating at the time, which is one and a half million kilometers from Earth, much closer than the James Webb Space Telescope station orbiting the second Lagrange point: Hubble is orbiting at an altitude of approximately 515 kilometers and since its launch, more circled the Earth more than 184,000 times.

Hubble has many firsts, including being the first space telescope designed to be serviced by space shuttle astronauts if necessary. The precaution paid off right at the beginning of the telescope’s career, as shortly after Hubble was put into operation, it became clear that there were problems with the quality of the images, caused by a defect in the main mirror. This and several other minor errors were corrected during a ten-day repair mission in 1993 by the astronauts who arrived on the scene with Endeavor, thanks to which Hubble has been able to transmit more and more spectacular images of the phenomena in space ever since.

When we look at the space telescope’s performance in terms of numbers, we get surprisingly low and high numbers: Hubble has observed only 0.1% of the sky in the past 34 years, but that does not mean that it has collected little data, since more than It made 1.6 million observations, during which it detected more than 53,000 objects in space, according to the European Space Agency. According to NASA data, the number of objects in space on which Hubble has collected data is more than 100 million. The space telescope sends data at a speed of 1 megabit per second, and its data archive has grown to 430 terabytes over the past three and a half decades, of which 184 terabytes are available to scientists at the STSI (Space Telescope Science Institute). Relying on Hubble’s observations, researchers have so far published 44,000 studies, and last year alone, 1,056 scientific works were published in various journals based on tests conducted with the telescope. The demand for the telescope’s services is so great that the observation time is six times oversubscribed.

The Hubble Space Telescope has suffered several times in recent years due to malfunctioning hardware components, but the problems have been overcome and the space telescope continues its mission, now as an additional partner of the James Webb Space Telescope. In NASA’s archive footage, we can see the videos presented during the conference held after the launch and release of the telescope about the beginning of the Hubble mission, captured by the crew of Discovery in 1990. In a longer recording, among the main moments of the STS-31 mission, parts about Hubble were also included, including the release of the Hubble around the 36th minute.

(Photo: NASA)

Thirty years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope escaped failure
On December 2, 1993, the space shuttle Endeavor set off for the Hubble Space Telescope to perform a critical repair on the spacecraft, without which the telescope would never have been able to fulfill its expected scientific mission.