Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 25th anniversary this week. A lot of us are unaware of the fact that Hubble has four more contemporaries. In the 1980s NASA had commissioned the “Great Observatories” and each had been architected and built to study the various wavelengths of light.
The 4 Great Observatories which have been launched from 1990 till 2003 are Hubble, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope, chronologically.
Hubble Space Telescope had been launched 25 years back, on April 24th 1990. It has 4 main scientific instruments which allow it not only observe in visible light but also close to ultraviolet and infrared. With the help of Hubble, scientists and researchers have been able to determine how old our Universe is and what quasars are along with helping to discover ‘dark energy.’
Astronomers have been using data from all these telescopes together over the years. Along with harvesting far-fetched scientific rewards, the combined datasets from various observatories very frequently makes extravagant images which help viewers to have a much more complete depiction of our enthralling Universe. Images with various kinds of light are referred as “multiwavelength” images by astronomers.
Hubble’s images expose the complex, three-dimensional structure of galaxies, nebulae and star-forming regions with implausible acuteness, essentially because the telescope is positioned in space. For ground-based telescopes, the Earth’s atmosphere has a blurring effect, which limits the sharpness of the images that they generate. Hubble’s images are partial only by the telescope’s engineering and the properties of light itself.
Hubble has sustained its mission well past its original planned lifetime and has made over a million observations and generates around ten terabytes of new data every year. The existing plan is for it to operate beyond 2020, to allow some overlap with its replacement, the NASA/ESA/Canadian Space Agency joint project, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).