🛰️ Mission
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
- Launched
- 24 April 1990, 36 years ago
- Working for
- 36 years so far
- Built by
- NASA and ESA
- Sees
- Ordinary light, Ultraviolet light, Infrared light
- Where it is
- Circling Earth about 540 km up, once every 95 minutes
- Best known for
- Measured how fast the universe is growing, and took the deepest pictures of it anyone had seen
Did you know?
- Its mirror was ground to the wrong shape. For three years the pictures were blurred, until astronauts fitted it with corrective optics in 1993.
- Astronauts serviced it five times. Nobody has visited it since 2009, and it has been pointing on a single gyroscope since June 2024.
What it showed us
Pillars of Creation
Towers of gas and dust where new stars are being born.
Horsehead Nebula
A dark cloud of dust shaped like a horse’s head.
Lagoon Nebula
A glowing cloud in Sagittarius, faintly visible without a telescope.
Veil Nebula
Delicate threads of gas from a star that exploded about 8,000 years ago.
47 Tucanae
The second-brightest globular cluster in the sky, next to the Small Magellanic Cloud.
Messier 5
One of the oldest star clusters in our galaxy, more than 12 billion years old.
Pistol Star
One of the brightest stars known in our galaxy, hidden behind dust.
Mars
The red planet, with the tallest volcano in the solar system.
More NASA photos of Hubble Space TelescopeStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.
GALEX
Ten years of the ultraviolet sky.