Note: This post may contain affiliate links, which means if you make a purchase, I could earn a small commision at no cost to you. I appreciate your support!
Today, April 25th is the 27th anniversary of the day that the Hubble Telescope went into orbit. Isn’t that amazing!
Here are some cool facts that you can amaze your friends with tonight over dinner:
- Hubble does not travel to stars, planets or galaxies. It takes pictures of them as it whirls around Earth at about 17,000 mph.
- Hubble has traveled more than 3 billion miles along a circular low Earth orbit currently about 340 miles in altitude.
- Hubble has no thrusters. To change pointing angles, it uses Newton’s third law by spinning its wheels in the opposite direction. It turns at about the speed of a minute hand on a clock, taking 15 minutes to turn 90 degrees.
- Outside the haze of our atmosphere, Hubble can see astronomical objects with an angular size of 0.05 arc seconds, which is like seeing a pair of fireflies in Tokyo from your home in Maryland.
- The Hubble archive contains more than 140 terabytes, and Hubble science data processing generates about 10 terabytes of new archive data per year.
- Hubble weighed about 24,000 pounds at launch and currently weighs about 27,000 pounds following the final servicing mission in 2009 – on the order of two full-grown African elephants.
- Hubble’s primary mirror is 2.4 meters (7 feet, 10.5 inches) across.
- Hubble is 13.3 meters (43.5 feet) long — the length of a large school bus.
Absolutely mesmerizing.
All of the images you see in this post belong to NASA. Just thought that I would point that out in case it wasn’t obvious. 😀
Science. It’s cool! Go here to check out all of the amazing things about the Hubble Space Telescope.
If you are looking for an excellent article to get you started in Astronomy, you can read this lovely article by my friend Jenny over at Hobby Help. You’re going to love it!