Looking To The End Of Time

Hubble Space Telescope - 15 Years of Discovery (Episode 9): Looking To The End Of Time - The Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is one of the biggest scientific projects of all time and is approaching the 15th anniversary of its launch.

In many ways Hubble is the most successful scientific project in the World, and this event is not likely to go unnoticed. The European Space Agency, ESA, has decided to celebrate this anniversary with the production of a Hubble 15th Anniversary movie called "Hubble - 15 Years Of Discovery".

The movie covers all aspects of the Hubble Space Telescope project: a journey through the history, the trouble and the scientific successes of Hubble.

This portrait of one of the biggest scientific projects of all time contains large amounts of previously unpublished footage in uncompromised quality.

With the beautiful backdrop of Hubbles visual image treasures running as a red line through the movie, the light and dreaming style tells the most interesting stories about our fascinating Universe and about the change of vision that Hubble has brought us.

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The Hubble Space Telescope (HST), named after Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953) who was one of the great pioneers of modern astronomy, is a collaboration between ESA and NASA. It is a long-term, space-based observatory. The observations are carried out in visible, infrared and ultraviolet light.

In many ways Hubble has revolutionised modern astronomy, not only by being an efficient tool for making new discoveries, but also by driving astronomical research in general.

During 15 years of viewing the sky, Hubble has taken more than 700000 exposures of more than 22 000 celestial objects. The spacecraft itself has whirled around Earth nearly 88 000 times, travelling more than 4000 million kilometres.

The orbiting observatory generates enough data every day - about 15 gigabytes - to fill more than three DVDs, and in total it has produced 23 terabytes of data, equal to the amount of text in 23 million novels.

Over 3900 astronomers from all over the world have used the telescope, and compiled a long list of scientific achievements, published in more than 4000 papers, such as:

- calculating the precise age of the Universe to be 13 700 million years old);
- confirming the existence of a strange form of energy called dark energy;
- detecting small proto-galaxies that emitted their light when the Universe was less than a 1000 million years old;
- proving the existence of super-massive black holes;
- seeing a comet hitting Jupiter; and
- showing that the process of forming planetary systems is common throughout the galaxy.

• http://www.esa.int
• http://www.spacetelescope.org