Hubble; An Overview of the Space Telescope [NASA Pub. 2013-07-032-GSFC]

65, [1] plus covers. Color Illustrations. Cover has some wear and soiling. This book provides an overview of the historic space telescope with sections that briefly describe its history, design, operations, and cultural impact. This book is a joint projects of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Institute. The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center. GSFC is the largest combined organization of scientists and engineers in the United States dedicated to increasing knowledge of the Earth, the Solar System, and the Universe via observations from space. GSFC is a major U.S. laboratory for developing and operating unmanned scientific spacecraft. GSFC manages operations for many NASA and international missions including the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the Explorer program, the Discovery Program, the Earth Observing System (EOS), INTEGRAL, MAVEN, OSIRIS-REx, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), and Swift. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. The HST is named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble. With a 2.4-meter (7.9 ft) mirror, Hubble's four main instruments observe in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared spectra. Hubble's orbit outside the distortion of Earth's atmosphere allows it to take extremely high-resolution images, with substantially lower background light than ground-based telescopes. Many Hubble observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, such as accurately determining the rate of expansion of the universe. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) selects Hubble's targets and processes the resulting data, while the Goddard Space Flight Center controls the spacecraft. Hubble is the only telescope designed to be serviced in space by astronauts.…