Long time ago before people had been in space some people dreamed of a space telescope. The first person who did a scientific work about a space telescope was DR. Lyman Spitzer JR. at Princeton University. He wrote a scientific thesis "PROJECT RAND - Astronomical Anvantages of an Extra-Terrestrial observatory", dated 1 sept.1949! So you could call him "The father of the space telescope idéa"!

And then in 1977 the idéa was put on the drawing table by NASA! So from blue print to orbit it took 13 years and cost 10 billion Skr.

The Hubble Space Telescope consists of 5 different instruments, they are:Telescope, Faint Object Camera, Spectrograph, Photometer and Wide Fileld Camera.

Telescope
Telescope on earth can distinguish one side from another on a swedish 50 öre (coin) 3 km away. But Hubble can do it 60 km away.

The mirror in the telescope is the smoothest ever made. If you enlarge the mirror to the size of USA , the highest point would be 25mm.

Faint Object Camera
The Faint Object Camera amplifies the object 1 000 000 times.

Spectrograph
This instrument tells what colors the stars have, and what materials they are made of, and also temperature.

Photometer
Photometer is a light speed meter, it tells you how bright something is. This photometer is very quick, every second it can tell how bright something is 100 000 times. The instrument has no moving parts.

Wide Field Camera
The Wide Field Camera takes wide field pictures.

British Aerospace made the solar cellpanels.

To use the instruments they had to know where to point the telescope. To do this correctly they needed a catalogue of 15 million guide stars. Previous catalogues contained 250 000 stars. They went down to about 9th magnitude. Hubble would need fainter stars.

In 1990, the 12th april, the HST was put into orbit. The telescope is 13m long, weigh 11 ton and has a mirror with the diameter of 2,4 meter. Hubble Space Telescope is 600 km above earth.

HST can look seven times farther out into space than earth bound telescopes, and with ten times better resolution. This means that the visible universe is increased by 350 times.

HST will teach us more about the universe and our place in the universe. In the begining there was a lot of problems with the HST, but after two mending expeditions everything works well. NASA plans two more expeditions in the year 1999, 2002, february-97 space shuttle STS-82 with a crew of seven men took off from Cape Carneval for repairing mission. They upgraded the HST with some new instruments and repaired some things. NASA estimates that HST will be in full work to 2005. But it can be in good condition for many years after that. No one knows! The space sond Pioner-10 had an estimated life time for 21 month , but it was working for 25 years. NASA are now begining to think about a new space telescope.

23 October 1983 the space telescope got the name Hubble after Edwin Powell Hubble. He's was born on november 20, 1889 in Marshfield, Missouri, USA, and lived to September 28, 1953.

Hubble studied in University of Chicago on physics and astronmy line, and he took PHD in astronomy 1917 at the same university.

After WW1 he come to the Mount Wilson observatory near Pasadena in California. In the year1923 he confirmed that Andromeda was a galaxy outside our own galaxy. This discovery is contradictory to the previous belief that the whole universe was contained in our galaxy. He could prove that the universe does expand. And he also proved that a far away galaxy moves with higher speed than a galaxy closer to us.