using balloons and rockets astronomers
have successfully launched telescopes
into Earth orbit above the distorting
effects of the atmosphere to explore
deep space nASA has had great success
with robotic probes like Voyager that
have observed and sent back images of
our solar system NASA and its partner
the European Space Agency are now on the
verge of launching a huge optical
observatory into orbit around the earth
Hubble Space Telescope will see objects
even near the edge of the known universe
with 10 times finer detail than possible
from the ground at the heart of the
observatory is an 8-foot mirror ground
to near perfection when pointed at an
object the mirror collects light and
sends it to six instruments various
satellites and ground stations relay the
instruments information to the Space
Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore
Maryland viewing screens will allow
scientists to make real-time
observations at the same time a
tremendous amount of data will be
generated according to dr. Eric JSON
we're talking about a huge amount of
information in fact we colloquially
referred to this as drinking from a
firehose in order to help astronomers
plan observations the Space Telescope
Institute has the largest star catalogue
in the world containing 19 million
celestial objects the catalogue was made
by scanning over 1,400 photographic
plates of the entire sky the plates are
also stored in a giant database so
astronomers can call up a region like
the Andromeda galaxy and manipulate the
images with false color
in our lifetime Space Telescope should
match the discoveries made since the
beginning of astronomy we hope to see in
the words of Galileo Galilei wondrous
things those were the words that he used
in 1609 we want to see star systems we
want to see images of the planets but in
particular space telescope is designed
to look out into deep space to study
deep space astrophysics to go out to
around that we've not yet been able to
study well