{"id":541949,"date":"2010-04-23T09:00:32","date_gmt":"2010-04-23T13:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/badastronomy\/?p=14031"},"modified":"2010-04-23T09:00:32","modified_gmt":"2010-04-23T13:00:32","slug":"happy-20th-anniversary-hubble-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/541949","title":{"rendered":"Happy 20th anniversary, Hubble! | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope<\/a>. I spent ten years of my life working on that magnificent machine, from using observations of a supernova for my PhD, all the way to helping test, calibrate, and eventually use STIS, a camera put on Hubble in 1997.<\/p>\n

Last year, I published Ten Things You Don’t Know About Hubble, and I don’t think I can really add much to it here. I also have a lot of new readers since then, so I’ll simply repost it now as my tip o’ the dew shield to the world’s most famous observatory.<\/p>\n


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Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n

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On April 24, 1990, the Space Shuttle Discovery<\/em> roared into space, carrying on board a revolution: The Hubble Space Telescope. It was the largest and most sensitive optical-light telescope ever launched into space, and while it suffered initially from a focusing problem, it would soon return some of the most amazing and beautiful astronomical images anyone had ever seen.<\/p>\n

Hubble was designed to be periodically upgraded, and even as I write this, astronauts are in the Space Shuttle Atlantis<\/em> installing two new cameras, fixing two others, and replacing a whole slew of Hubble’s parts. This is the last planned mission, ever, to service the venerable ’scope, so what better time to talk about it?<\/p>\n

Plus, it’s arguably the world’s most famous telescope (it’s probably the only one people know by name), and yet I suspect that there are lots of things about it that might surprise you. So I present to you Ten Things You Don’t Know About the Hubble Space Telescope, part of my Ten Things series<\/a>. I know, my readers are smart, savvy, exceptionally good-looking, and well-versed in things astronomical. Whenever I do a Ten Things post some goofball always claims they knew all ten. But I am extremely close to being 100% positive that no one who reads this blog will know all<\/em> ten things here (unless they’ve used Hubble themselves). I have one or two big surprises in this one, including some of my own personal interactions with the great observatory!<\/p>\n

Ten Things You Don’t Know About Hubble<\/a><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

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Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. I spent ten years of my life working on that magnificent machine, from using observations of a supernova for my PhD, all the way to helping test, calibrate, and eventually use STIS, a camera put on Hubble in 1997. Last year, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}