The Hubble Space Telescope, a workhorse if ever there were one, hit the 100,000-orbit mark on August 12 almost 20 years after it was first launched into space in April 1990. Hubble travels about 5 miles a second with an odometer that now reads 2.72 billion miles, the equivalent of 5,700 trips to the moon. Round and round it orbits Earth, all the while shooting breathtakingly spectacular photographs of the cosmos that we would never see otherwise. To mark the occasion, Hubble pointed its camera eye to a nebula that is near star cluster NGC 2074, some 170,000 light-years from Earth. And the resulting photograph is truly breathtaking. Could this be a glimpse of heaven?
To mark the occasion of its 100,000 orbit around Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope pointed its camera eye to a nebula some 170,000 light-years away. The resulting photograph is truly breathtaking. Could this be a glimpse of heaven? Keep clicking for photos of the telescope and more magnificent photos of the cosmos.
"That's a lot of orbits and that represents a lot of miles and a lot of time," Hubble Space Telescope deputy senior project scientist Malcolm Niedner told Fox News. "It's been just a fabulous long journey of scientific discoveries, with more to come." No one really thought Hubble would last this long. Even though it has been hit with micrometeorite impacts and temperature extremes in orbit, Hubble keeps on going. It has been key to numerous discoveries in outer space, including finding the farthest planet ever discovered some 26,000 light-years away from Earth.
Galaxies gone wild! See images shot by the Hubble Space Telescope that show galaxies in various stages of collision, playing a kind of celestial bumper cars. The smash-ups produce new and unusual shapes, including one that looks like an owl in flight and another that is the spitting image of a toothbrush.
"It's explored entirely new grounds in terms of the ability to see things in detail, and what has resulted from that is just marvelous," Bob O'Dell, an astronomer at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, told Fox. He started as a NASA project scientist for Hubble 19 years before its launch, helping to get the project off the ground. "Something like the Hubble Deep Field, which has penetrated far back in time, is the kind of thing that we'd always hoped to be able to do."
Click to see a green, gaseous blob--Is it a ghost? Or a frog?--that was found in outer space by an amateur Dutch astronomer. Scientists, who don't know what it is, are calling it a "cosmic ghost." Keep clicking to see other space objects photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Here's a fascinating discovery made by University of Texas astronomer Karl Gebhardt: Nearly all galaxies contain a massive black hole in their center that is an essential component for why galaxies look the way they do. Gebhardt says that without Hubble his work in black holes would not have been possible. The space shuttle will give Hubble a much-needed tune-up in October that should keep the telescope aloft until at least 2013.
What does Jupiter look like? Click here for some up-close photos shot by the Hubble Space Telescope.
