Hubble Space Telescope placed in orbit
The crew of the U.S.space shuttle Discovery places the Hubble Space Telescope a long-term space-based observatory into a low orbit around Earth.The space telescope conceived in the 1940s designed in the 1970s and built in the 1980s was designed to give astronomers an unparalleled view of the solar system the galaxy and the universe.Initially Hubbles operators suffered a setback when a lens aberration was discovered but a repair mission by space-walking astronauts in December 1993 successfully fixed the problem and Hubble began sending back its first breathtaking images of the universe.Free of atmospheric distortions Hubble has a resolution 10 times that of ground-based observatories.
About the size of a bus the telescope is solar-powered and orbits Earth once every 97 minutes.Among its many astronomical achievements Hubble has been used to record a comets collision with Jupiter provide a direct look at the surface of Pluto view distant galaxies gas clouds and black holes and see billions of years into the universes past.
