Posts Tagged: "Hubble Space Telescope"

Those who remember the earliest days of the Hubble mission will recall the tension surrounding a mechanical problem afflicting the Hubble. Even though the first images returned by Hubble were better than anything captured by telescopes here on Earth, NASA scientists quickly realized that the images weren’t as sharp as they should have been. Instead of letting the ill-formed telescope languish in space, incapable of fully realizing its mission, NASA embarked on a project that would eventually restore the Hubble Space Telescope to its intended clarity of vision.

Images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope also helped the global science community learn more about the formation of planets and galaxies. In 1995, Hubble captured images in the Orion Nebula of intense radiation jets reaching trillions of miles long as well as the gaseous protoplanetary disks which serve as raw material for the stars and planets of a forming solar system. Other planetary discoveries pioneered by Hubble researchers include the first visible-light image ever captured of a planet outside of our solar system, Fomalhaut b, located 25 light years from earth in the Piscis Australis constellation.