Last updated: April 28, 2019 at 20:50 pm

Created on Saturday, 31 July 2010 16:35

The Hubble Space Telescope, named after astronomer Edwin Hubble, is one of the most successful scientific projects of all time.

Positioned outside the Earth's atmosphere it has significant advantages over ground-based telescopes — images are not blurred by the atmosphere, there is no background from light scattered by the air, and the Hubble can observe ultra-violet light that is normally absorbed by the ozone layer in observations made from Earth.

Since its launch in 1990, it has become one of the most important instruments in the history of astronomy. With it, astronomers have made many observations leading to breakthroughs in astrophysics.