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On August 11th, 2008 the Hubble Telescope hit the 100,000 orbit mark! Since its launch in April of 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope has been traveling at 5 miles per second with its on-board odometer racking up around 2.72 BILLION miles! That’s about 5,700 trips to the moon and back! In October of this year the STS-125 crew will be be working on the 5th and final servicing mission to Hubble. There are currently 5 spacewalks scheduled for Atlantis where astronauts will install new equipment and repair broken instruments. Once this mission is complete, NASA’s favorite telescope will need to live out the remainder of its days alone in space, with no chance of repair. This is the story of the Hubble Space Telescope, or HST.

On August 11th, 2008 the Hubble Telescope hit the 100,000 orbit mark! Since its launch in April of 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope has been traveling at 5 miles per second with its on-board odometer racking up around 2.72 BILLION miles! That’s about 5,700 trips to the moon and back!

The Hubble was funded in the 1970s, with a proposed launch in 1983, but the project was plagued by technical delays, budget problems, and the Challenger disaster. Then when it finally launched in 1990, scientists found that the main mirror had been ground incorrectly, severely compromising the telescope’s capabilities. After a servicing mission in 1993 on STS-61 with Space Shuttle Endeavour, the telescope was restored to its intended quality. Hubble’s position outside the Earth’s atmosphere allows it to take extremely sharp images with almost no background light.

After the initial glitches were worked out, Hubble has been a workhorse for NASA. For 18 years this telescope has been traveling at extreme speed, while remaining perfectly focused on a single point in space millions of miles away, allowing it to take beautiful and stunning pictures that no Earth based telescope can. While Hubble is not the first telescope in space, it is by far the largest and most accurate.

In October of this year the STS-125 crew will be be working on the 5th and final servicing mission to Hubble. There are currently 5 spacewalks scheduled for Atlantis where astronauts will install new equipment and repair broken instruments. Once this mission is complete, NASA’s favorite telescope will need to live out the remainder of its days alone in space, with no chance of repair.

Hubble is in an decaying orbit. Unless a Shuttle or rocket is used to place it back in to orbit every so often, it will eventually fall back down to Earth. Since there are no longer plans to service Hubble, what do we do? Well, we let it fall! It’s going to be replaced by a newer and shinier telescope named the James Webb Space Telescope. Although JWST has a planned mass half that of the Hubble, its primary mirror has a collecting area which is almost 6 times larger. We still have plenty of time to see new and amazing images come from Hubble, as this new telescope is planned for launch sometime after 2013.

For more information or to join in on the conversation, join us live every Friday morning at 2:00am Coordinated Universal Time, or download additional podcasts like this one on the SpaceVidcast YouTube channel or in High Definition on iTunes.