Today, April 24th is a very significant day. Well yea, you probably say, thinking that today you can buy an Apple Watch. The release of Apple Watches is significant, but that’s not what I was thinking of.
Twenty five years ago today, April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched on the Space Shuttle Discovery.
Long, long ago, man looked at the heavens with the naked eye, and even with only his eyes, figured out a lot about the stars and planets and their movements. Galileo came along and invented the telescope, and the search for knowledge about outer space was on. They were able to figure out how many planets make up our solar system, which ones have moons, see the rings around Saturn and map galaxies like the Milky Way.
The telescopes got better with time being built larger and more sophisticated and accurate. In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble used the largest telescope at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in California to search for galaxies, planets and stars within our Solar System. To honor his significant contribution to the field os astronomy, the Hubble Space Telescope was named after him.
Since its launch, Hubble has circled the Earth along a circular low earth orbit 340 miles in altitude and traveled more than 3 billion miles. It has made more than 1 million observations since its mission began in 1990. The telescope has the accuracy of .007 arc seconds, which is like being able to shine a laser beam on a dime 200 miles away and operating outside the haze of our atmosphere, it can see astronomical objects with an angular size of 0.05 arc seconds — that’s like seeing a pair of fireflies in Tokyo from Washington D.C. Hubble weighs 24,500 pounds (as much as two full-grown elephants) and is 43.5 feet long — the length of a large school bus.
Hubble has peered back into the very distant past, to locations more than 13.4 billion light years from Earth. Let’s see the Apple Watch do that. Happy Birthday, Hubble!!
—30 —