Hubble Space Telescope - Highlights Over The Years

The shuttle Discovery's seven astronauts, commanding Canada's robot arm, deployed the 43-foot-long Hubble Space Telescope one day after an April 24, 1990 launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

Observing with Hubble requires a strategy led by a control center at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) to lead science operations. Both are in the Baltimore area. The imagery gathered by Hubble, in an orbit well above 300 miles altitude, is transmitted to NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, then to a ground station in White Sands, N. M., and forwarded on to the GSFC and the STSI.

Imaged in 2010 with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, the Carina Nebula's Mystic Mountain is a three-light-year tall cosmic pinnacle comprised of colorful dust and gas that real signs of intense star forming activity.

NGC 2906 is a colorful galaxy imaged with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed during NASA's final space shuttle servicing mission to the space telescope in May 2009. The brilliant blue speckles depict clusters of massive, young stars burning through their fuel at an aggressive rate. The swaths of orange are a mix of aging stars that have swollen and cooled.

The Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation is considered one of Hubble's most iconic images. As seen in visible light, the pillars are comprised of dust and gas seared by radiation emitted by stars and eroded by strong stellar winds from nearby stars.

Galactic interation is part of the universe's often violent evolution. Galaxy UGC 2369 is actuall two galaxies being pulled together by gravity and distorting their spiral shapes initially with a tenous bridge of gas, dust and stars. Typically, large galaxies like the Milky Way merge with smaller star systems. Every few billion years large galaxies meet the same fate.

This image by Hubble on June 27, 2019 reveals not only giant Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot but also a more intense array of colors swirling in the planet's turbulent atmosphere than seen in recent years. The Earth and Jupiter were in opposition, or about 400 million miles apart when this image was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3.

Well known in its own right, the Hubble Space Telescope is also a team player. This image of NGC 4258 reveals a galaxy 23 million light years away sporting a giant black hole, shock waves and massive amounts of glowing gas. The composite image includes detail from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue, radio data from the National Science Foundation's Karl Jansky Very Large Array in purple, visible data from Hubble in yellow and data in infrared from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shown in red.

NGC 2022, is a planetary nebula that resides in the constellation Orion. While its designation comes from its rounded planet-like appearance, NGC 2022 is a star that has grown old, a red giant casting off its outer layers into space, while its core shrinks, emitting ultraviolet light that causes the gases to glow.

The Southern Crab Nebula, officially known as Hen 2-104, resides several thousand light years away in the constellation Centaurus. This 2019 image from the Hubble Space Telescope, a composite of different colored images taken with the observatory's Wide Field Camera 3, reveals an aging red giant star and a burned out white dwarf star both embedded in a flat disk of gas.