WASHINGTON -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, launched into orbit 10 years ago this month, is a star with the U.S. Postal Service.

Five new commemorative stamps unveiled Monday feature some of Hubble's most famous pictures.

The stamps feature the Ring Nebula, Lagoon Nebula, Egg Nebula, Galaxy NGC 1316 and the Eagle Nebula, nicknamed the "Pillars of Creation."

"I found the images to be riveting," said Postmaster General William Henderson, moments before unveiling the stamps at a ceremony at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Joining Henderson at Goddard were NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, Maryland's congressional delegation and some of the scientists, engineers and astronauts who worked on Hubble. Goddard is home to Hubble's operations center.

The Hubbles stamp series includes the most spectacular images from the telescopes archives.

The telescope has returned "some of the most exciting scientific discoveries ever made," Goldin said, including the birth and death of stars, the beginning of planetary systems and the mysterious workings of black holes -- collapsed stars that are so dense that not even light can escape their gravitational pull.

"Hubble allows us to grasp things we could scarcely imagine," Goldin said.

Originally targeted for launch on April 10, 1990, the $2.1 billion Hubble was put into space two weeks later -- on April 24 -- aboard the space shuttle Discovery on STS 31.

Two months after it was released into orbit 360 miles (580 kilometers) above Earth, scientists discovered that the curve of Hubble's 8-foot (2.5-meter)) circular mirror was off by 1/50^th the diameter of a human hair.

That was enough to cause an annoying, blurry halo around the objects that Hubble observed.

It took a spacewalk by astronauts aboard shuttle Endeavour on STS 61 in December 1993 to install a corrective lens and put Hubble in working order.

Over the years, the telescope named for American astronomer Edwin Hubble has logged 1.4 billion miles (2.3 billion kilometers) on more than 55,000 orbits of Earth. It has taken more than 259,000 pictures of 13,000 celestial objects.

It would take more than 1 million floppy disks to hold the nearly 7 terabytes of data generated by Hubble. Stacked, the disks would reach a mile in height.

Although Hubble was expected to operate in space for 15 years, its lifetime has been extended five years, to 2010. But to cut costs, NASA will not service it with a space shuttle past 2004. That will pare the operating budget to $60 million a year from $200 million a year now.