posted 04-24-2020 10:33 AM               

The 35th shuttle mission, the 10th flight of Discovery, was a highlight shuttle coverage for me personally in a number of ways.

There was a great deal of "launch fever" and "space" excitement on the Florida Space Coast with thousands of invited guests here, many of them distinguished astronomers and scientists from all across the globe to witness the big telescope's grand finale rocket ride. Once in orbit, the large school-bus size Hubble Space Telescope was traveling around our planet--and still is--at just over 17,000 mph orbiting Earth every 95 minutes. At launch, the HST weighed a whopping 24,000 pounds.

While even though Hubble's deployment was only a 5-day flight after 80 Earth orbits, the 340-mile high flying telescope observatory with its twin 25-feet long solar arrays would forever change the world with new discoveries of our universe — that still are — even today, still providing new information and data.

There would be five HST shuttle repair and servicing missions, all successful, from 1993 to 2009. Even today, Hubble transmits about 120 gigabytes of science data every week. That's about roughly 3,600 feet of books on a shelf.

Perhaps the most incredible feature about HST is that the orbiting telescope can detect distant objects that can't otherwise be seen at all from Earth. New Hubble discoveries during the last 30 years included the creation of a 3-D map of mysterious dark matter way out in space, finding two moons of Pluto, helping to determine the rate of the universe's expansion and age, and discovering that every major galaxy is anchored by a black hole.

Hubble has made more than 1.3 million observations since April 27, 1990. Astronomers using HST have published more than 15,000 scientific papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built. And of those paper studies, they have been cited in other paper reports almost 800,000 times.

Below is a quickly-put together astrophilately display panel in tribute of STS-31, the Discovery crew of Loren Shriver, Charlie Bolden, Steve Hawley, Bruce McCandless and Kathy Sullivan, and the amazing Hubble Space Telescope for our continued exploration of the vast universe.

Happy 30th Birthday Hubble!