![]() NASA astronauts installed additional mirrors to compensate for the flaws in 1993 and upgraded other scientific instruments on five different occasions, with the last upgrade being in 2009. ![]() Unfortunately, the Hubble needed to be repaired immediately after launch, when it turned out its mirror was slightly flawed. ![]() HST is jointly operated by NASA and the European Space Agency and was designed to be serviced by astronauts. The size of the telescope and its location above Earth's atmosphere (with its pesky weather and distortions from air currents) make HST one of the best optical telescopes still in operation. Hubble is primarily an optical telescope, viewing the cosmos in the same type of light we can see, and it also has the ability to see into the infrared and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum of light. HST is a bus-sized satellite containing a 2.4-meter-diameter mirror for focusing light from distant objects, along with a suite of instruments for photography, measuring light intensity, and taking the spectrum of various astronomical sources. In honor of National Space Day on May 6, Stacker collected 50 Hubble images taken between 19 that express the beauty of the universe and important scientific knowledge. Hubble was named for American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who in the early 20th century helped establish that the universe is much bigger than the Milky Way and showed the cosmos is expanding. For more than 30 years, HST has provided astronomers with incredible scientific data on everything from solar system objects to some of the most distant galaxies in the cosmos. This orbiting telescope was the first of NASA's Great Observatories. On April 24, 1990, the Space Shuttle Discovery launched, carrying the Hubble Space Telescope (or just "Hubble").
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