The Hubble Telescope is Celebrating its 25th Anniversary

For a quarter century, the Hubble Telescope has been unlocking celestial mysteries by letting us see space up close. The scope has made more than 1 million observations, answering questions about more than 38,000 objects in space.

In October 2014, for example, the Earth-orbiting scope spotted a galaxy 13 billion light-years away — the smallest, faintest, farthest galaxy yet. It’s helped us hone in on the age of the universe (13 to 14 billion years old) and discover dark energy, what NASA describes as “a mysterious force that causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate.”

In celebration of the anniversary — the actual launch happened Apr. 24, 1990 — NASA and the European Space Agency, which jointly operate Hubble, released a new image of a sparkling star cluster called Westerlund 2, a grouping 3,000-stars strong that exists 20,000 light-years from Earth (the first image in the slideshow below).

“The giant star cluster is only about two million years old, but contains some of the brightest, hottest and most massive stars ever discovered,” noted the ESA in a news release marking the occasion. Westerlund resides in the breeding ground called Gum 29, in the constellation Carina. This image (and the four close-ups that follow) showcases just what a resource Hubble has become in our space-exploration arsenal.

New York City’s Intrepid Museum currently has a temporary exhibit, which opened Thursday, Oct. 23, 2014, and runs for about a year, paying homage to the Hubble Telescope and to the crews and missions that keep it running. Mike Massimino, a former astronaut and Intrepid advisor who helped conceive of the new exhibit, flew two of those missions. “It’s a dream job for an astronaut,” he told weather.com before the exhibit opened. “There’s no question of the scientific importance of it. Hubble was built to be repaired and upgraded by astronauts on the Space Shuttle.” The actual space-flown tools he and his fellow astronauts used to do that are now on display.

They include a handrail pulled from the telescope. A washer extraction tool. A roller. But there’s also the basketball Edwin Hubble — the scope’s namesake — used at the University of Chicago, and a home plate from Shea Stadium, the former home of the Mets baseball team. Massimino said there’s even the front page of Hubble’s thesis (the person, not the telescope). All three objects went to space.

Journeys to Hubble to fix the telescope theoretically ended with the Space Shuttle program, but Massimino said anything’s possible. Regardless of whether we go back to Hubble, the scope is still giving us insight into far off and hard-to-reach places. And for NASA and ESA, that’s cause for celebration. “Hubble has completely transformed our view of the universe,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, in a news release, “revealing the true beauty and richness of the cosmos.”

Below, the official anniversary image of Westerlund 2, along with 100-plus images taken by the Hubble Telescope since its launch 25 years ago.

April 24 marks the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Telescope. To celebrate, NASA and the European Space Agency, which jointly run the telecope, released this image of the star cluster Westerlund 2. (NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team/A. Nota/Westerlund 2 Science Team)

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