This week marks 15 years since the Hubble Space Telescope, hailed by some commentators as the most successful astronomy mission ever, was placed in orbit. Since 25 April 1990, it has snapped 750,000 images, sending 120 gigabytes of data back to Earth each week. But now the end may well be nigh for the ailing telescope. news@nature.com looks back over Hubble's career and forward to the next generation of space scopes.
Perhaps Hubble's most impressive achievement is to have peered into the farthest recesses of the Universe, allowing cosmologists the chance to witness the first stars in the act of formation. Images called the Hubble Ultra Deep Fields , taken using lengthy exposures of around a million seconds, capture light from so far away - which has travelled for so long to reach us - that the pictures show astronomers what was happening almost as far back as the Big Bang.
In recent years, Hubble has also taken ultraviolet images of Saturn's striking aurorae , captured high-speed galactic collisions , and provided hundreds of posters for physics students' bedroom walls.
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