The NASA Hubble Telescope: An Astronomer's Holy Grail

On the 11th of August this year the NASA Hubble telescope finished its one-hundred-thousandth orbit of earth and therefore it has offered scientists (and astronomers in particular) eighteen full and long years of dedicated service. In honor of this moment the NASA Hubble telescope got directed towards a very promising region of space where very interesting things are happening like stellar renewal and birth.

Star Clusters

The NASA Hubble telescope has managed to give us excellent images of small expanses of space that’s situated near a group called NGC 2074. This particular patch of sky is characterized by firestorms in which new stars are being born, supposedly the result of several supernovas occurring near to each other and near to clusters of living stars.

The NASA Hubble telescope has confirmed the total distance to the Tarantula nebula, which is a curious and fascinating part of all the star creating sections of the galaxy.

Whenever the next round of repairs is carried out by NASA engineers and astronauts there will be considerable work to reinforce and repair the armor protecting this particular camera, among the most important aspects of the NASA Hubble telescope. For example, one of the new components they will be installing will be a protective layer to provide the Hubble with greater protection.

Among the plethora of spectacular achievements to the NASA Hubble telescope’s credit, a particularly notable one would have to be the images it caught of the fantasy-like deep space sceneries where enormous dust towers loom large in the middle of vacuous expanses of space, full of the most incredible colors and detail.

Astronomers have been using the photos that the NASA Hubble telescope has provided to definitively identify this region of space for what it is.

The original inventor of this enormous and useful device, Edwin Hubble, used it in the first place to confirm his theories about the expansion of the universe and the relation of galaxies between each other. He noted that the farther away a galaxy was, the faster it appeared to be distancing itself from us. These insights helped scientists formulate what we now know as the Big Bang Theory.

In a relatively short time—within five years or so—the NASA Hubble telescope will come to the end of its lifecycle and will be decommissioned, but the valuable information it has furnished science over the last eighteen years will never be forgotten.