Written by: Dikshanta Singh - 21136, Grade XII
Posted on: 08 September, 2020
From the birth of creation to a mere 400 years ago, everything we learned about our world came from naked-eye observations. Galileo then aimed his telescope in 1610 toward the heavens. The earth was already in for an awakening. We discovered, Saturn had rings. Jupiter had moons over there. The nebulous patch, called the Milky Way, across the middle of the sky was not a cloud but a series of countless stars. In only a few years, our notion of the natural world will be transformed forever. A revolution in science and culture soon followed.
In the following decades, telescopes grew in length, diversity, and, naturally, in strength. They were put as far away as possible from the city lights and above the haze of the atmosphere. In the 1920s at Mt. Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, Calif. Edwin Hubble, after whom the Hubble Telescope is named, used the largest telescope of his day to explore galaxies beyond ours. The observatory, Hubble, is the first large optical telescope to be mounted in space, the ultimate mountaintop. Hubble has an unimpeded view of the world over the distortion of the atmosphere, well above rain clouds and light pollution. In our solar system, scientists used Hubble to study the most distant stars and galaxies, as well as the planets.
The launch and deployment of Hubble in April 1990 marked the greatest advance in astronomy since the Galileo telescope. Our view of the world and our position inside it has never been the same thanks to five servicing missions and more than 25 years of service.
