NASA released a new amazing comparison photo to mark the anniversary of the first astronaut mission to restore the blurred view of the Hubble Space Telescope 25 years ago.
After the launch of the telescope in 1990, NASA discovered a manufacturing defect in the main mirror of the observatory, which affected the blurring of early Hubble photos. During a shuttle flight in 1993, astronauts performed a spacewalk to install a replacement instrument and focus the telescope's view.
The image shows three views of the central area of the spiral galaxy M100, obtained using the Hubble camera in 1993 (left), 1994 (center) and 2018 (right)
In honor of the 25th anniversary of the mission, they released three comparative views of the central area of the spiral galaxy M100, 55 million light-years distant from us. For the photo on the left, a wide-angle and planetary camera 1 was used, after which it was changed to camera 2 with corrected vision. The photos of 1994 were taken with the help of a replaced camera, installed on December 2, 1993, during the mission of servicing the astronauts of the STS-61 shuttle. This is the first of 5 flights to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. The wide-angle and planetary camera 2 had corrective optics that compensate for the defect of the mirror and present a clearer picture.
The image on the right was mined with the latest Hubble instrument - a wide-angle camera 3 installed during the last service mission on May 4, 2009. These three images demonstrate a consistent improvement in the capabilities of the space observatory. For 25 years since the correction of his vision, Hubble received many amazing photos of the cosmos and helped to make revolutionary discoveries, including confirmation of the expansion of the Universe.
It is expected that the telescope will work until 2020. But NASA’s new-generation space telescope, James Webb, is about to be replaced, and is scheduled to launch in 2021.
