STS-135 - The Last Shuttle Mission: STS-135 T-5 Days

Hubble telescope

In 1990, STS-31 launched the Hubble space telescope. It was to provide deepest pictures into space ever. But there was a problem. When the mirror was ground it incorrectly accounted for the gravitational flex difference between Earth and orbit. It was near sited. Fortunately, the Hubble had been designed to be serviced and improved by astronauts on future shuttle missions. STS-61 in 1993 was able to install corrective lenses to restore its vision.

Since then, four additional missions have been flown to add new instruments expanding the capabilities and modernizing the telescope.

Hubble photo before and after the correction

With the vision corrected, the Hubble has been taking pictures of the universe that could only have been dreamed. The thing with looking into space, is that the light takes a long time to get to earth, The further away you are looking, the longer it takes to get here, the further back in time we are looking. You may remember something from science class about the Big Bang that started the universe we live in. Astronomers estimate that happened over 13 billion years ago. They talk about the telescopes as how long after the Big Bang can they see. The graphic shows a comparison. Earth based observatories can see about halfway back in time to the Big Bang - about 6 billion years. The Hubble Ultra Deep photo reached to within 500 million years of the Big Bang

Comparison of Telescopes

Ultra Deep Field Photo

So is there anything out there? Hold a sewing pin at the end of your arm as far as you can hold it. Put the head over a completely dark section of sky, even dark to earth bound telescopes. The Hubble telescope was pointed at a spot like that and left to absorb the minute amounts of light that had traveled over12 billion years to get to Earth. The picture of the sky was taken over a 10 day period of a spot like that. There are 10,000 dots of light in the picture. Every dot on the picture is a separate galaxy. When zooming in on sections they look like the second picture.