The Hubble Space Telescope was one of the greatest achievements of NASA and of the United States in general. After its near cancellation before the completion of the telescope it has just had its 25th anniversary! Launched in 1990, Hubble has produced some of the most breathtaking images of our universe and provided us with new information about our solar system, and universe.

http://history.nasa.gov/brief.html

NASA stands for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was founded in October of 1958 as a result of the Sputnik crisis, when the Russians launched the first satelite into space. NASA started with missions to see if life could survive in space, and then gradually stepped up the experiments until they landed a man on the moon in 1969. NASA has also launched many useful probes and satelites into our atmosphere, and onto other planets in our solar system. All of which has provivded much new and groundbreaking information.

Hubble has changed astronomy and has given us much more information than we had before. Hubble found that the universe was 13-14 billion years old, which is much more accurate than the 10-20 billion years that scientists were estimating. It also helped astronomers understand and even discover the presence of dark matter that makes the universe expand at a different rate than normal.

The Hubble Telescope is one of NASA’s longest running and most succesful space missions, and has also added the need for extra missions to do minor repairs on the telescope, which keeps the interest and funding in space missions. During the space race in the Cold War space exploration was a global competition, but NASA has created the ISS (International Space Station) that is worked on and inhabited by many counries in the world.

The need for space exploration and the continued support of NASA is directly supported by the Hubble Telescope, and it also give us our eyes into the universe.

http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/hubble_essentials/