BRENT: The Hubble Space Telescope, 340 miles above Earth, turns 25 today, but no one should call it old. It’s mature. It’s the great silverback of astronomy, grizzled from wear and tear, and yet still powerful and utterly dominant in its field.
The Hubble changed our understanding of the age of the universe, the evolution of galaxies and the expansion of space itself. Along the way it has had the equivalent of knee and hip replacement surgery: Five times, astronauts on the space shuttle paid a visit to swap out old batteries and install new instruments, including, in 2009, the best camera the telescope has ever had.
“It’s fantastic. It’s better than ever. That’s not just hype, it’s the truth,” said Jennifer Wiseman, the senior project scientist for the Hubble at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“This is 1970s technology, and it is still, after 25 years, the most powerful scientific instrument in the world,” said astrophysicist Patrick McCarthy of the Giant Magellan Telescope under construction in Chile.
NASA on Thursday marked the silver anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope with fireworks, of a celestial kind, conveyed by the orbiting observatory itself.
To commemorate Hubble’s launch on April 24, 1990, NASA selected a picture of a stellar nursery located about 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina.
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