This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been pinging back beautiful images of outer space for over 30 years now. Its sparkling galaxies adorn countless computer desktops, add a dose of realism to sci-fi TV shows and are plastered over the dorm walls of space-mad physics students all over the world.
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Hubble can do much more than take a pretty picture. Since it left the Kennedy Space Centre on the back of the Discovery shuttle on the 24th April, 1990, Hubble has been orbiting Earth and making over a million observations, which in turn have formed the basis of over 15,000 scientific papers. It has peered an incredible 13 billion years into the past, shown us supermassive black holes, completed hundreds of thousands of orbits and continues to be crucial in helping us understand our place in the universe.Its mission is soon drawing to a close. It will be phased out by the end of 2026, when it will be superseded by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The latter telescope is currently is getting ready for service in its target orbit – 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth. Its first images are expected to reach Earth this summer.This seemed as good an opportunity as any to ask people who have seen thousands of Hubble images to select a few photos from the archives. Seven employees of the European Space Agency (ESA) have handpicked their favourites, and explained what makes them so special.
‘The mission helped us answer fundamental questions about the very nature of our universe’
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If you look at the outer-left spiral in the photo you can see a bright, shining point. This is, in fact, a fading supernova, which Hubble managed to capture brilliantly. HST’s observations of NGC 2525 formed part of one of its major investigations, which was measuring the expansion rate of the universe. The mission helped us answer fundamental questions about the very nature of our universe. – Bethany Downer, ESA/Hubble chief science communications officer.
‘This picture reminds me almost every single day that nature is perhaps the greatest source of inspiration for artists’
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‘Some of those instruments are in their third generation now’
‘We can actually pick up weather patterns happening in real time!’
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‘These images were taken with an instrument that has been on Hubble for over 20 years’
‘I can look back at older images and see how it has moved and changed’
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