From astronaut servicing missions to breathtaking images,
from science proposals to science papers, Hubble’s got the numbers!
To begin with, this space superstar is 43 feet long
and 14 feet wide. That’s about the size of
a big yellow school bus!
Hubble weighs 27,000 pounds,
heavier than two full-grown elephants.
Now imagine this giant beast orbiting Earth
about 300 miles up, zipping around at a
jaw-dropping 17,000 miles per hour.
That’s like traveling from New York to Los Angeles
in less than 10 minutes!
Every 95 minutes, Hubble completes
a full orbit around the Earth,
giving it a front-row seat to
the wonders of the universe.
In fact, since its launch in 1990,
Hubble has traveled over 5 billion miles,
going around our planet over 190,000 times!
Powering this cosmic giant are its solar arrays,
generating over 5,000 watts of electricity.
That’s used to power the hardware on Hubble and to
simultaneously recharge its batteries that are
used when Hubble is in the shadow of the Earth.
Hubble’s hardware, which includes everything from
computers to cameras, uses a total of
2100 watts of electricity.
That’s enough to power 210 LED lightbulbs.
Hubble’s optics feature a 7.8 foot
primary mirror that is polished so smooth that if you stretched
it to be the width of the United States,
you would never find a bump higher than 6 inches.
Hubble has two 16-megapixel cameras,
this allows Hubble to capture the universe in stunning detail,
taking us from our Moon 240,000 miles away,
to objects in our solar system millions of miles away,
to galaxies hundreds of millions of light-years away,
and even to some of the farthest galaxies
around 13.4 billion light-years away!
In fact, Hubble’s mirror collects light 40,000 times better
than the human eye!
This system is so powerful that Hubble can
spot a nightlight on the moon.
To keep Hubble at peak performance,
astronauts visited five times to service the telescope.
These missions included
essential upgrades and repairs that extended
Hubble’s life and modernized its technology.
From installing new cameras to replacing gyroscopes,
each mission was a complex,
high-stakes endeavor.
In total, 32 astronauts have flown to Hubble,
and with 5 servicing missions combined with
171 hours of spacewalks. these brave men
and women went above and beyond to ensure
our window to the universe remains crystal clear.
Hubble has over 1.6 million observations that resulted in
more than 22,000 peer-reviewed
scientific papers published in professional journals
on its discoveries.
Those papers have been cited in other papers
over 1.3 million times.
That’s a lot of cosmic knowledge all because
of one space telescope!
Hubble’s groundbreaking discoveries revolutionized
our understanding of the universe.
From measuring the rate of its expansion,
to finding evidence of black holes,
and even peering into the atmospheres of
planets around other stars.
Even with so many observations over three decades,
Hubble has still only observed around
1/10th of 1% of the entire sky!
That means Hubble has a lot more
of the universe to explore!
So the next time you gaze up at the night sky,
remember that Hubble is out there,
unveiling the secrets of the cosmos.
Over its more than three decades in orbit,
we really have learned a lot
about our place in the universe…
Thanks to one incredible telescope!
Follow us on social media @NASAHubble