Astronomers are placing another candle on Hubble’s birthday cake. The Earth-orbiting telescope is celebrating its 17th birthday, making it a mere teenager. This teenager, however, has produced some breathtaking images of celestial objects and has helped astronomers answer many important questions about our universe.
NASA launched the Earth-orbiting telescope on April 24, 1990, when George W. Bush’s father was president and the World Wide Web was still a dream. In its 17 years of exploring the heavens, the telescope has snapped nearly 500,000 images of more than 25,000 celestial objects. It has made nearly 100,000 trips around Earth. Those trips have racked up lots of frequent-flier-miles — more than 2.4 billion, the equivalent of a round trip to Saturn.Hubble’s 17 years of observations have produced more than 30 terabytes of data, equal to about 25 percent of the information stored in the Library of Congress. Each day the orbiting observatory generates about 10 gigabytes of data, enough information to fill the hard drive of a typical home computer in two weeks.
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