NASA Celebrates the 30th Anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope

NASA marked April 24^th as the 30^th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s launch into the low earth orbit in 1990.

Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the largest space telescopes and is named after American astronomer Edwin Hubble. It is a collaborative project of NASA and the European Space Agency. It was launched into space on April 24^th, 1990- 3 decades ago.

Great Observatories

Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is one of NASA’s Great Observatories- 4 large space telescopes. The other Great Observatories are the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO), Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO) and the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST). Only the HST, CXO and SST are still operational. The CGRO was deorbited in 2000. The HST is one of the longest in-service space telescopes.

Space Telescope

Space telescopes or space observatories are telescopes launched on satellites to space to observe the universe without the disadvantages faced by ground-based observatories- like light pollution, distortion of light by the atmosphere, filtering of certain frequencies of radiation, etc. The first such space telescope was the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory.