Music. Mikulski: Over here is the picture taken after the servicing mission and this is what the new 1994 Wide Field Planetary Camera picture will show us. The pictures are remarkable. The science that will come from the pictures are of historical significance. Postman: Just from seeing that one picture, you knew that this was going to be a revolutionary telescope.[ Boom ] Heckman: Using Hubble to study the evolution of galaxies, we exploit the fact that a telescope in astronomy acts like a time machine. When we look at the most distant objects in the universe with Hubble, we're actually looking far back into time. The light has taken something like ten to twelve billion years to reach Earth when we look at the most distant galaxies. Postman: Hubble's ability to provide very crisp images, far crisper and cleaner and clearer than any other telescope, allows you to see what these things look like. They're not just fuzzy blobs of light. Ferguson: What we're trying to do is piece together the history of galaxy evolution, from the very very earliest galaxy which we can see, which now we're getting within about a billion years of the big bang all the way to the present. Postman: The other thing that Hubble allowed us to do is get very precise measurements of the colors of these galaxies and those colors tell us about the kind of stars that are in the galaxies and how old those stars are. Music. Ferguson: There are sort of two ways of thinking about a redshift: There's the Doppler Effect.[ Music ] Music. Music. Music Ferguson: So objects that are moving toward you if that were happening in light, the light would be shifted to the blue, if it's moving away from you it would be shifted to the red. In cosmology, there's another aspect, the whole universe is expanding and that's essentially stretching the light on its way from the distant object to us, and that really allows you to determine where in the universe the objects you're seeing are because you're measuring essentially that stretching factor.Heckman: It's not like we're invent a better toothpaste or solve the energy crisis, we're doing things that are at the frontiers of knowledge.Postman: One of the great things is about being able to study this history of galaxies is it not only tells us about what the cosmic history of formation of stars and galaxies is, but it also can tells us stuff about our own galaxy's past and its potential future as well.Heckman: I think people just have a powerful urge to understand their origins. Ferguson: How did we get here? What was before the Earth? What was before the Sun? Those kinds of simple questions that are startlingly hard to answer and the amazing thing is that we can start to answer many of them. Music ends.