The Hubble Space Telescope

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the first Earth-orbiting reflecting telescope. The paper examines how the Hubble Space Telescope serves a vital function in increasing our knowledge of the universe. The paper explains that since its launch in 1990, despite several crucial problems, it has revealed a universe full of mysterious bodies, nebula, star systems and galaxies and has expanded the possibilities that humankind is not alone in the universe.

From the Paper:

"The first scientific idea for a telescope such as the HST came about in 1946 when Lyman Spitzer issued a proposal for a space telescope with a primary mirror between sixteen and fifty feet in diameter. Throughout the 1960's and 1970's, with the ultraviolet observatories OAO-2, OAO 3 and the IUE in the planning stages, the space telescope remained only a dream, due to the lack of technology. Yet Spitzer did not give up, for by the 1970's he had offered another proposal for a space telescope which would be able to provide images of very faint objects as contrasted to ground-based telescopes which suffer from distortion due to the Earth's atmosphere. According to Spitzer, such a telescope would not "supplement our present ideas of the universe we live in, but rather would uncover new phenomena not yet imagined and perhaps would modify profoundly our basic concepts of space and time" (42)."

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