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The Hubble Space Telescope turned 30 on Friday, and to commemorate the occasion, Hubble released an amazingly appropriate image.
Showing two nebulae, NGC 2020 and NGC 2014, some 163,000 light years from Earth, the image reveals part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way galaxy.
Since launching on the shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990, the telescope has revealed some of the great wonders of the universe to humanity.
NASA wanted to collect images of the cosmos free from the interference of atmospheric distortion and artificial light, so a mission was established to launch a telescope into orbit around Earth.
Astronauts on the shuttle visited Hubble five times to make improvements and repairs to the 43-foot-long observatory.
Hubble initially demonstrated the existence of supermassive black holes and discovered that they are located in the center of most galaxies.
It also helped determine the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years, by determining the current rate of expansion of the universe with an uncertainty of only three percent.
Its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will launch next year, and will specialize in infrared wavelength, allowing you to observe some of the farthest and farthest nooks and crannies in the universe.
