30 YEARS OF HUBBLE

It’s 30 years since NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit on 24 April 1990. It was carried aloft in the payload bay of Space Shuttle Discovery, and for three decades Hubble’s history was closely intertwined with the Shuttle’s. It was originally scheduled for launch in 1986, but the tragic Challenger accident at the start of that year led to a four-year delay.

When Hubble finally made it into orbit, it still wasn’t plain sailing. Almost immediately a serious flaw was discovered in the telescope’s mirror which made stars look slightly blurred rather than sharp pinpoints of light. Since the whole point of putting Hubble above the Earth’s atmosphere was to avoid the blurring that ground-based telescopes suffer from, this was disastrously bad news. For any other astronomical satellite the situation would