>Photo: NASA

Today, April 24, 2009, the Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its 19th birthday. During its time of the service on behalf of scientists, Hubble has taken some of the most amazing, detailed pictures of planets, stars, galaxies, and a host of other space objects.

Here are some trivia about the Hubble Space Telescope:

* In its 19 years of viewing the heavens, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has made more than 880,000 observations and snapped over 570,000 images of 29,000 celestial objects.

* Hubble does not travel to stars, planets, and galaxies. It takes pictures of them as it whirls around Earth at 17,500 miles an hour.

* In its 19-year lifetime, the telescope has made more than 100,000 trips around our planet. With those trips, Hubble has racked up plenty of frequent-flier miles, about 2.8 billion, the planet Neptune’s average distance from the Sun.

* The 19 years’ worth of observations has produced nearly 39 terabytes of data, enough to fill almost two collections in the U.S. Library of Congress.

* Each month the orbiting observatory generates more than 80 gigabytes of data.

* The Hubble archive sends about 2 terabytes of data each month to astronomers throughout the world.

* Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 7,500 scientific papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built. In 2008 scientists published nearly 700 journal articles on Hubble telescope data.

In order to celebrate Hubble’s 19th birthday, NASA has released its list of the top 12 scientific discoveries by the Hubble Space Telescope. To read this amazing list and see all 12 of NASA’s picks for the Hubble’s top scientific discoveries, visit the official Hubble site.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Hubble Telescope, NASA

var addthis_pub = ‘claude mariottini’;