Hubble telescope how long will it last

The next-generation space telescope is perfectly poised to study things like forming stars and planets, extremely distant galaxies, and even the atmospheres of exoplanets, which are all best seen in infrared. But Hubble is best suited for observing in the ultraviolet UV and optical ranges of the light spectrum.

During the final space shuttle mission to service the telescope in , Atlantis crew members gave Hubble a major upgrade during five separate spacewalks.

All this means that Hubble got a renewed lease on life that may well carry it through several more decades. The final servicing mission also included the installation of a Soft Capture and Rendezvous System, or SCRS — a ring-shaped docking port to enable future spacecraft likely robotic to connect to the telescope and safely deorbit it.

But the SCRS also opens the door for future servicing missions. Hubble will continue to work for as long as its components operate and it provides a good service to the scientific community.

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Login or Register Customer Service. RISE —. PHASE —. The telescope completed 30 years in operation in April and could last until — First conceived in the s and initially called the Large Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope took decades of planning and research before it launched on April 24, Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Term Paper. Hubble is a robust machine with many built-in redundancies, and its operators have drawn up a number of contingency plans over the telescope's long life, Sembach said.

JWST is optimized to view the cosmos in infrared light, while Hubble sees more in the visible and ultraviolet wavelengths. Using both space telescopes in tandem "really gives you a more panchromatic view of the universe than you would get just from Hubble alone, or just from Webb alone," Sembach said.

The Hubble Space Telescope circles Earth at an altitude of miles kilometers , but its orbit decays over time due to atmospheric drag. This means that a decision looms for NASA, regardless of how long the telescope continues to be healthy and scientifically productive.

The space agency will have to either "de-orbit" Hubble in a controlled fashion, sending the hallowed observatory to its doom over the Pacific Ocean, or boost it to a higher orbit that will keep Hubble aloft for decades to come. It will allow astronomers to look not only farther out in space but also further back in time: It will search for the first stars and galaxies of the universe.

It will allow scientists to make careful studies of numerous exoplanets — planets that orbit stars other than our sun — and even embark on a search for signs of life there. The Webb is a machine for answering unanswered questions about the universe, for exploring what has been unexplorable until now.

The launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, named after famed astronomer Edwin Hubble , was itself a huge leap forward for astronomy. Here on Earth, astronomers seek out remote mountaintops and deserts to build major telescopes for the best chance of viewing a dark sky away from pollution and bright lights. Hubble has meant so much during its year run. It helped establish many of the boundaries that the Webb hopes to push.

The Webb, named for the man who led NASA in the decade leading up to the moon landing, is set to take all this a step further. The Webb improves on Hubble in two key ways. The first is just its size: Hubble was about the size of a school bus, whereas Webb is more like the size of a tennis court.

When it comes to reflecting telescopes, the key component is the size of its curved mirror. The more light you can collect in this bucket, the fainter and farther-away things you can see in the universe. Overall, that amounts to more than six times the light-collecting area. What does that mean in practice? In , scientists set the Hubble to stare off into a teeny-tiny patch of sky about the size of the head of a pinhead, held at arm's length from the viewer and capture as much light as it could from that one spot.

The image that came back was astounding. Hubble uncovered thousands of galaxies in this teensy patch of sky, helping us refine the number of galaxies thought to exist in the universe. In astronomy, the farther away things are, the older they are because light from faraway places takes a very long time to travel to Earth. That means this Hubble Deep Field is not only a snapshot of space: It also contains the history of our universe. Galaxies in this image appear to us as they were billions of years ago.

Hubble has seen light dating to about million years after the Big Bang, which took about The Unexplainable newsletter guides you through the most fascinating, unanswered questions in science — and the mind-bending ways scientists are trying to answer them.

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