Just like its eponymous human counterpart Edwin Hubble, who changed the perception of mankind with his cosmic discoveries, the Hubble Space Telescope has taken us to a dazzling itinerary of cosmic journeys, giving us not only a mere glimpse but substantial gazes of the stunning worlds we knew not of.
The two-decade-old telescope is considered as one of National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) "most successful and long-lasting science missions," producing ultra-sharp images of stars, nebulas and galaxies billions of light years away from us that are not just eye candies, but are also stepping stones to notable scientific breakthroughs.
But every success was born out of a throng of failures, and the Hubble was not an exception.
Since earliest days of the invention of telescope, man's cosmic investigation has been mired by the atmosphere. It causes a minor flaw called "atmospheric distortion" that makes stars appear to twinkle and it also blocks certain wavelengths necessary to analyze stars and galaxies, which no ground-based telescope-not even the colossal and powerful ones-could completely overcome.
But Hubble was destined to go beyond it. On April 24, 1990, the $1.5 billion cosmic eye pierced through the Earth's blanket aboard Space Shuttle Discovery, and settled into orbit to seize the answers to man's life-long questions about the Universe.
Contrary to what was anticipated, the Hubble telescope gave unsuccessful previews of the vast world beyond ours. The images sent back at home were fuzzy and utterly underwhelming. But engineers at NASA were quick to spot the flaw called spherical aberration that caused it, sending corrective optics to the telescope three years after its launch.
As Hubble marks its 24th year in orbit, the Space Telescope Science Institute releases a yet another magnificent shot of the infinitesimal portion of space, reinforcing Hubble's prowess in capturing more than what meets the eye.
The birthday image is a part of NGC 2174 or the Monkey Head Nebula, which is about 6400 light-years away. Nestling in the constellation Orion (The Hunter), the vibrant region is specked with young stars scattered in the bright wisps of cosmic gas and dust. Previously viewed in 2001, Hubble captured a jaw-dropping image of the NGC 2174 in 2011 and revisited it for its birthday.
Hubble's existence will also be celebrated by a commemoration of the same lenses that redeemed the telescope from its cockup.
Titled "Repairing Hubble," the exhibit presented at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington lets visitors in on a throwback featuring Hubble's corrective optics: the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) instrument and the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2).
COSTAR installed the correct lenses in front of Hubble's first generation instruments-the Faint Object Camera, the Goddard High Resolution Spectrometer, and the Faint Object Spectrograph. The WFP2, which was built in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, was already in works as an upgrade but was rushed to fill in the inadequacies COSTAR could not.
