![]() ![]() In addition to its 92-inch primary mirror to collect light, fine guidance sensors to point and lock on to targets, and solar panels for power, Hubble's original configuration included four key scientific instruments: A day later, astronauts guided the 43-foot, 12-ton telescope from the cargo bay of the space shuttle Discovery, out into orbit 332 miles above Earth’s surface. ![]() More than 40 years after it was conceived, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was launched into Earth orbit from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Hubble calculated that Andromeda is approximately 900,000 light-years away, more than eight times the distance to the farthest known stars in the Milky Way, which conclusively proved that Andromeda is a separate star system and the Milky Way is not the sum of the universe.įor this reason-and his many other accomplishments as an astronomer-NASA formally named the space telescope after him in 1983. He was able to make these calculations by measuring the variation of the luminosity (the length of time it takes a star to go from bright to dim and back again) of Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy based on a formula developed in 1912 by Harvard “computer” Henrietta Leavitt. With these findings, he changed how we view our place in space. Wilson Observatory in California, which led him to conclude that Andromeda is not a nebula, but a galaxy and, most importantly, that the Milky Way is only one of the galaxies in our universe. In 1923, Astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble spent months collecting data about the largest known spiral nebula at the Mt. Four Successful Women Behind the Hubble Space Telescope's Achievements.Characterizing Planets Around Other Stars.Measuring the Universe's Expansion Rate. ![]()
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