Hubble Trivia
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- In its 10 years of surveying the heavens, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made 330,000 exposures and probed 14,000 celestial targets.
- Hubble has whirled around Earth 58,400 times, racking up 1.5 billion miles. That's like making 8 round trips to the Sun.
- The orbiting observatory's observations have amounted to 3.5 terabytes of data.
- Each day the telescope generates enough data - 3 to 5 gigabytes -- to fill a typical home computer.
- Hubble's archive delivers between 10 and 15 gigabytes of data a day to astronomers all over the world.
- Astronomers have published 2,651 scientific papers on Hubble results.
- The Hubble Space Telescope is very big -- about the size of a large school bus or tanker truck.
- The tubular part of Hubble's body is 14 feet across, and the telescope stands 43 feet tall -- about as high as a five-story building.
- On the ground, it would weigh over 25,000 pounds, but in space it weighs nothing.
- When the space shuttle Discovery carried Hubble into orbit, the telescope completely filled Discovery's cargo bay.
- Hubble orbits the Earth at an altitude of about 368 miles. It takes about 90 minutes to complete one orbit around the Earth. Hubble passes into the shadow of the Earth for 28 to 36 minutes in each orbit. The orbit inclines at a 28.5-degree angle.
- This orbit is high enough that Hubble is above the Earth's atmosphere and can conduct its science operations without the negative effects of the atmosphere.
- Seeing through Earth's atmosphere is similar to looking at objects through a pool of water. Remember how little you can see when you open your eyes under water and how much better you can see when you are out of the water. It is very similar as far as science is concerned with the telescope. The Earth's atmosphere acts similarly to water and greatly reduces what we can see in space from the ground. Hubble is in orbit above the atmosphere because it has unrestricted visibility into space and can "see" much better than anyone or anything on the ground.
- The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) is the "workhorse" camera for Hubble. It provides us with pictures of the universe on a grander scale than any camera to date. The camera can detect stars over one billion times fainter than we can see with our eyes.
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