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The Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 tomorrow, but no one should call it old. It's mature. It's the great silverback of astronomy, grizzled from wear and tear and yet still powerful and utterly dominant in its field.
The Hubble changed our understanding of the age of the universe, the evolution of galaxies and the expansion of space itself. Along the way it has had the equivalent of knee and hip replacement surgery: Five times, astronauts on the space shuttle paid a visit to swap out old batteries and install new instruments, including, in 2009, the best camera the telescope has ever had.
"It's fantastic. It's better than ever. That's not just hype, it's the truth," said Jennifer Wiseman, Hubble's senior project scientist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland.
"This is 1970s technology, and it is still, after 25 years, the most powerful scientific instrument in the world," said astrophysicist Patrick McCarthy of the Giant Magellan Telescope under construction in Chile.
Video: Hubble's control room and a sneak peek at its successor

The Hubble was designed to be serviced by the space shuttle. But the shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, and the Hubble hasn't had a repair job since 2009. At some point, under the laws of entropy that dominate the cosmos, the Hubble will begin to deteriorate - for example, losing its navigational ability as its gyroscopic sensors fail one by one.
"It's kind of like predicting when's the next time your car's going to break down," said Jim Jeletic, Hubble's deputy project manager.
Electronics eventually go haywire in the radiation of space. As it orbits the earth 15 times a day, the 13-metre tall Hubble goes in and out of sunlight, expanding and contracting, and that puts stress on its systems. Micrometeorites ding the exterior. One antenna has a hole that looks as if it was hit it by a slug from an air rifle.
Hubble's fate, however, is cloudy. The great telescope is essentially stranded in space.
The Hubble was conceived in the 1940s, designed in the 1970s and 1980s, and has vintage hardware, including a 1980s-era computer that freezes up occasionally and has to be rebooted remotely.
And then there's gravity. The Hubble is orbiting about 550km above the earth, significantly higher than the International Space Station. There's just a trace of atmosphere that high, but it's enough to drag the Hubble a tiny bit and cause it to descend a little over 1.5km per year.
Nasa said that, based on current projections, the Hubble - which has no means of propulsion - was expected to re-enter the atmosphere "around 2037".
One option would be to send a robotic craft to dock with the Hubble and guide it to a fiery, but controlled, re-entry into the Pacific Ocean. Another option would be to boost the telescope to a higher, "parking" orbit where it would stay for centuries as a piece of space junk.Built with the assistance of the European Space Agency, the Hubble is a global resource. Nasa gets more than 1,000 proposals a year from scientists around the world hoping to take advantage of the telescope's unique capabilities. Jeletic describes the resolution of the Hubble as equivalent to shining a laser on a coin 300km away.
"Hubble gave us beauty in a way that no other telescope had ever done," said John Mather, the Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist at Nasa Goddard who is the senior scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to be launched in late 2018.
 

Seeing deep into space
Famous namesake: The Hubble Space Telescope, launched aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1990, is named after the US astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953).
Steady, now: The telescope is so steady and accurate it can take an image of a target without deviating more than the width of a human hair seen at a distance of 1.6km, according to Nasa.
Data bonanza: Hubble sends back about 140 gigabits of raw science data every week, and has helped scientists publish more than 12,800 papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever.
Time machine: Because it sees things that are so distant, the telescope offers a view of the distant past. The light from the most distant objects seen by Hubble left their stars more than 13.4 billion years ago. This has helped nail down the age of the universe to 13.8 billion years.
The Big Bang: Hubble's main accomplishments include confirming the existence of the "expanding" universe, which provided the foundation for the Big Bang theory.
Stars galore: Before Hubble, the orthodox belief was that there were tens of billions of galaxies. Now, thanks to data from the telescope, scientists can say there are roughly 200 billion.
Agence France-Presse, The Washington Post


The Hubble Space Telescope turns 25

Images taken from Hubble (Clockwise from top left) - the Cat's Eye Nebula; the Eagle Nebula's 'Pillars of Creation'; five galaxies known as Stephan's Quintet. Photos: AP

Astronauts repairs the telescope in 1999.

Clockwise from above: Astronauts repairs the telescope in 1999 and images taken from Hubble - the Cat's Eye Nebula; the Eagle Nebula's 'Pillars of Creation'; five galaxies known as Stephan's Quintet.Photos: AP

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It changed our view of the universe, but the 25-year-old space telescope's days are numbered


The Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 on Friday, but no one should call it old. It's mature. It's the great silverback of astronomy, grizzled from wear and tear and yet still powerful and utterly dominant in its field.


The Hubble Space Telescope turns 25

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}It changed our view of the universe, but the 25-year-old space telescope's days are numbered

It changed our view of the universe, but the 25-year-old space telescope's days are numbered