NASA Hubble Space Telescope Celebrates 32nd Birthday: Here’s What It Accomplished In The Past Decade

The Hubble Space Telescope just celebrated its 32nd birthday! NASA has provided various photographs from this optical device throughout the years to commemorate the event.

NASA Celebrates 32nd Birthday in Space

Sprout Wired said Hubble acquired over 125,000 shots with this instrument, including the deepest views of the universe ever obtained, which was indeed eye-opening.

With that, NASA has created a film commemorating Hubble's birthday. The space agency gave a rundown of some of the photographs and discoveries produced by the telescope in previous months and years.

It includes observing the weather on Jupiter and Saturn, including how the storm that makes up Jupiter's Great Red Spot is getting faster, and Saturn's bands of the atmosphere are changing colors.

Furthermore, research on the atmospheres of two of Jupiter's moons, Ganymede and Europa, found that they contain water vapor.

Digital Trends further mentioned that Hubble has observed the eerie star CW Leonis in the Milky Way, obtained an ultraviolet image of planet PDS 70b, and detected an expanding bubble of gas at the galaxy's core.

Hubble has discovered a black hole that appears to be assisting in the formation of stars rather than destroying them, as well as solving the enigma of a mirrored double galaxy and detecting the furthest star ever observed, whose light took nearly 13 billion years to reach Earth.

Here are three more of the device's most mind-blowing photographs from the last decade.

Butterfly Nebula

On June 18, 2020, NASA revealed one of the most spectacular photos of NGC 6302, often known as the "Butterfly Nebula."

According to NASA, it depicts the Butterfly Nebula in all light wavelengths, from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared, to assist "researchers better understand the processes at work in its technicolor 'wings' of gas."

The star(s) at the nebula's center form the wing, which are zones of hot gas surpassing 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

NGC 6302 is a galaxy in the constellation Scorpius between 2,500 and 3,800 light-years away.

Eagle Nebula

NASA published this picture of a portion of the Eagle Nebula on January 5, 2015.

Hubble astronomers captured the image in near-infrared light to show stunning star details concealed behind the nebula's gas and dust veils.

New stars may be seen at the pillars' tops that aren't visible in visible-light photographs.

Saturn Opposition

Hubble also got one of the most famous images of Saturn.

NASA published the image on July 26, 2018, and it shows Saturn's gorgeous ring system in great detail.

When this photograph was obtained, Saturn was just around 1.36 billion miles away from Earth, about as near as it ever comes to us.

History of Hubble

The Sun (via The New York Post) said NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope (or Hubble for short) on April 24, 1990, after being envisaged in the 1940s.

The Hubble Space Telescope, named for astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953), is now hovering about 340 miles above Earth's surface, completing 15 orbits every day.

It is one of NASA's four primary observatories, alongside the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and Spitzer Space Telescope.

The instrument has been dubbed "one of humanity's greatest scientific inventions" by NASA.

This optical equipment has established itself as one of the most well-known and successful in modern astronomy's history.

Even though the space telescope has been without a maintenance team for nearly 13 years and has experienced a series of malfunctions in recent years, NASA still hopes to make new discoveries with Hubble.

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