Author: Jeremiah Jacques / Source: theTrumpet.com
On this day in 1990, history was changed when the Hubble Space Telescope was placed in orbit.
For decades before this event, astronomers would spend long nights in frosty observatories peering through telescopes and striving to capture clear images of the heavens. But their view was clouded by Earth’s atmosphere.
“The Earth’s atmosphere is a fluid, chaotic soup of gas and dust,” nasa states. “It blurs visible light, causing stars to twinkle and making it difficult to see faint stars. It hinders or even totally absorbs other wavelengths of light, making observations of such wavelength ranges as infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays and X-rays difficult or virtually impossible.”
As early as the 1920s, scientists realized that in order to see the cosmos clearly, they would have to place a telescope in space, above the distortion and turbulence of Earth’s atmosphere. But for decades, this was only a starry-eyed pipe dream.
In his book The Universe in a Mirror, Robert Zimmerman explains the remarkable 50-year struggle that scientists waged to turn that dream into a reality with the Hubble project. “Conceived in the 1940s and 1950s, its gestation was long and difficult, blocked by naysayers and doubtful scientists who feared its cost,” he writes. “Designed in the 1960s, its birth was long and difficult as engineers, astronomers and bureaucrats fought over its design.
Built in the 1970s and 1980s, its childhood was at first crippled, as a fundamental error in construction left its mirror defective.”But those decades of struggle culminated in one of mankind’s greatest scientific accomplishments. Zimmerman continues: “Fixed and maintained in the 1990s by high-flying astronauts who loved it as much as if not more than the scientists who used it, Hubble lifted a curtain from our view of the universe, changing it so profoundly that no human can look at the stars in the same way again.”
Since the launch of Hubble on April 24, 1990, and its release into orbit the following day, the telescope has made some 1.4 million observations of almost 45,000 celestial objects. It has truly changed the way we look at the stars. “Hubble, and the men and women behind it, opened a rare window into the universe,” Zimmerman writes, “dazzling humanity with sights never before seen.”
Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has explained that “the rare window” Hubble opens is not just…
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