NASA On Air: Hubble Space Telescope Celebrates 25 Years Of Exploration (4/23/2015)

  • Released Friday, April 24, 2015
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LEAD: The Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 25th anniversary of making new discoveries about our solar system.

1. Since April 24, 1990, Hubble has circled the globe at an altitude of 340 miles.

2. It is about the size of a bus, with a telescopic mirror that is 8 feet in diameter.

3. Hubble has found planets outside our solar system located billions of miles from Earth.

4. One of the biggest discoveries made by Hubble is that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate due to “dark energy,” a kind of repulsive gravity.

TAG: Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 12,800 scientific papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built.

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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

This page was originally published on Friday, April 24, 2015.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:49 PM EDT.