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The Hubble Space Telescope has stared out over billions of light years, to the edge of the Universe, the dawn of time itself. It is arguably the most important scientific instrument ever built, changing our understanding of our place in the cosmos. Planet Science meets the dedicated engineers who built and put a telescope in space; the astronauts who fixed its faulty eyesight and the astronomers who used Hubble’s unrivalled spatial resolution to unlock the secrets of the Universe.

The first calls for a telescope in space came in 1946 and the reason was simple. Beams of starlight can travel for billions of years across the cold, clean vacuum of space and never be touched, disturbed or blurred. It is in the final few seconds that the light slams into the dusty, polluted, chaotic atmosphere of Earth, distorting what we see. So the obvious answer is to get above the atmosphere but to put a telescope in space was going to be no easy task. Engineers Domenick Tenerelli and Jim Crocker recall the story of one of the greatest and longest engineering projects of the century.

After 20 years of development, the Hubble Space Telescope is ready to be launched until the Challenger disaster grounds all space shuttle flights. Eventually on April 24th 1990, the telescope is launched and released to orbit the earth and fulfil its promise of being the greatest telescope ever. But within weeks it became clear that something was wrong, very wrong. The optical systems, the only limit on the telescopes power and clarity, were flawed. On the heels of the Challenger disaster, it looked like NASA had lost the right stuff. But it was out of this adversity that NASA put together one of the most challenging and exciting shuttle missions ever attempted. Spacewalk specialist Jeff Hoffman was one of the team of astronauts who were charged with the task to ‘fix Hubble’. He recalls the magical experience of floating between heaven and earth, installing the devise that corrected the faulty mirrors like a pair of spectacles.

Now fully operational Hubble could begin the job it was designed for – hunting down the rarest, weirdest objects in the cosmos: quasars, supernovae and black holes. But Hubble has also been used to look at objects far closer to home. Mario Livio, senior astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, remembers the excitement of using Hubble’s sheer power and precision to see comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smash into Jupiter’s atmosphere.

More excitingly, Hubble has been used to look back to the dawn of time. In December 1995, Harry Ferguson and a team of astronomers took a big risk and pointed Hubble at a relatively blank section of the sky and left it there for ten days. What might have been an empty disappointment turned out to be a triumph – the Hubble Deep Field. Over the week and a half the telescope sensors detected the minute traces of light coming form the most distant objects on the other side of the universe, essentially travelling back through time and looking back at our ancestors.

But perhaps Hubble’s greatest achievement has been its impact on the public. Hubble images have wowed astronomers, inspired students, graced newspapers, posters and album covers around the world. The images convey what a million lines of data can never, the sheer scale, wonder and beauty of the cosmos.