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The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on the Space Shuttle in 1990.
The photo
below of the
Hubble Space Telescope was taken from the Space Shuttle
in orbit.
HST
is 44 feet
long, the size of a school bus and weighs 24,000
pounds. The HST is
in low
Earth orbit, 366 miles high.
In October 2008, a Space
Shuttle service mission will extend
Hubble's operational life until at least 2013. A guidance sensor will be
replaced to help
maintain HST's ability to point and focus on objects throughout the
universe. A new wide
field camera will allow Hubble to see fainter and more distant galaxies than
anything it has
seen before, shedding light on the early universe. This could allow Hubble
to see galaxies
so far away that we see them as they were just 400 million years after the
big bang.
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