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(Mikulski) Over here is the picture taken after the servicing mission and this is what the

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new 1994 Wide Field Planetary picture
will show us. The pictures are remarkable.

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The science that will come from the
pictures are of historical significance.

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(Postman) Just from seeing that one picture, you knew that this was going to be a

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revolutionary telescope.

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(music)

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(Heckman) Using Hubble to
study the evolution of galaxies, we

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exploit the fact that telescope in
astronomy acts like a time machine. When

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we look at the most distant objects in
the universe with Hubble, we're actually

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looking far back into time. The light has
taken something like 10 to 12 billion

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years to reach us when we look at the
most distant galaxies.

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(Postman) Hubble's ability to provide very crisp images, far crisper and cleaner and clearer than any

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other telescope, allows you to see what
these things look like. They're not just

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fuzzy blobs of light.

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(music)

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(Ferguson) What we're trying to do is piece together the history of galaxy evolution,

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from the very very earliest galaxies
that we can see, which we now we're

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getting within about a billion years of
the Big Bang all the way to to the present.

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(Postman) The other thing that Hubble
allowed us to do is get very precise

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measurements of the colors of these
galaxies and those colors tell us about

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the kind of stars that are in the
galaxies and how old those stars are.

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(Ferguson) There there - is sort of two different ways of thinking about a redshift:

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There's the Doppler effect.

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(music)

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So objects that are moving toward you if
that were happening in light the light

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would be shifted to the blue, if it's moving
away from you it would be shifted to the

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red. In cosmology, there's another aspect,
the whole universe is expanding and

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that's essentially stretching the light
on its way from from the distant object

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to us, and that really allows you to
determine where in the universe the

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objects you're seeing are because you're
measuring essentially that stretching factor.

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(Heckman) It's not like we're gonna invent a better toothpaste or solve the energy

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crisis, we're doing things that are at
the sort of frontiers of knowledge.

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(Postman) One of the great things about being able to study this history of galaxies is it not

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only tells us about what the cosmic
history of formation of stars and

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galaxies is, but it also can tell us
stuff about our own galaxy's past and

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its potential future as well.

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(Heckman) I think people just have a powerful urge to understand their origins.

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(Ferguson) How did we get here?

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You know. What was the, what was before the Earth? What was before the Sun?

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Those kinds of simple questions that are
startlingly hard to answer and the

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amazing thing is that we can start to
answer many of them.

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(music)