On this day in space! April 25, 1990: STS-31 deploys Hubble Space Telescope
On April 25, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was deployed!
On April 25, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was deployed!
Hubble is famous for taking some of the most amazing deep-space photos ever. It hitched a ride to space on the space shuttle Discovery with mission STS-31. Also on board were astronauts Charles Bolden, Loren Shriver, Bruce McCandless, Steven Hawley and Kathryn Sullivan.
The crew used a Canadian-built robotic arm to deploy Hubble from the shuttle's cargo bay while they were orbiting 332 nautical miles (534 kilometers) above the Earth. No one knew it at the time, but Hubble wouldn't be taking any pretty pictures anytime soon.
When Hubble took its first photos almost a month after it was deployed, the pictures were out of focus because of a flaw in its mirror. Thankfully, the problem was fixable, and astronauts successfully repaired it in 1993.
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Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.
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