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History Of The Hubble Telescope

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It’s been around for twenty years, it’s made over 930,000 observations, it has taken around 570,000 images of celestial objects, it has helped us figure out how old our universe actually is, plus much more. Do you know what NASA uses to find those things out? No? Yes? Well let me tell you, it’s the Hubble telescope. Now you may be asking what’s the Hubble Telescope? What is a Hubble telescope? Or you might just be thinking “oh I already knew what that was”. If you know what I’m talking about this shouldn’t be too confusing for you, but if you don’t know, well now you can finally learn about what helps us discover many things in our solar system. The Hubble telescope was not made by the actual person, in fact, it was named after him because …show more content…

The Hubble Telescope was first thought of by a man named Lyman Spitzer, he told people that a space telescope would be the perfect object to find out more about the universe. The first meeting about the space telescope was in 1966, Spitzer was teaching at Princeton University and they asked if he would like to be the leader of the National Academy of Science Ad Hoc, and he had agreed. In 1996 is when they knew that they were going to announce that a space telescope was going to be created. Now, Spitzer and his team couldn’t build it themselves, so they introduced the idea to NASA. NASA had agreed to take part in this mission and build the space telescope. 1971 was the year NASA’s Acting Administrator, George Low approved the space telescope. This project was going to cost roughly 400-500 million with all the right parts. The House of Appropriations Subcommittee turned down the funding. So the European Space Agency also known as ESA, they were offered to help with the paying of the parts. The ESA was willing to help but the only negative thing about this was they had to knock the price down to 200 million dollars, so they had to buy smaller parts. The funding started in 1977, and the telescope was originally supposed to launch in 1983, but some malfunctions happened along the way which isn’t that surprising. The day it was actually launched was on April …show more content…

Some of its most important discoveries include the pictures it takes and sends to us. These images have helped scientists estimate the age of the earth and the size of it. It is believed to be around 14 billion years old. It has detected black holes and if you don't know what black holes are they suck in everything around them including light. The Hubble Telescope also has something to do with dark energy and dark energy is a random force that has the ability to make the universe expand faster and faster as time goes. Another, discovery is the telescope has discovered is the details of gamma rays bursts and that is a powerful explosion of energy that happens when massive stars collapse. The Hubble has also shown us how galaxies formed. It revealed extraordinary details about the process by which sun-like stars and their lives as planetary nebulae. It may have helped is with identifying quasars, it showed us pictures of a clashing galactic quintet, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie “pillar of creation”., and famed butterfly nebula. It has shown us the birth of stars, and imagery of the cosmos. Hubble's’ millionth observation was a spectroscopic measurement, gas giants. Those were just some of the many discoveries that the Hubble Telescope has

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