Hubble Space Telescope Facts for Kids

A Picture of a the NASA Hubble Space Telescope

This web page contains Hubble Space telescope facts for kids and is a great resource for anyone of any age researching this famous telescope. We’re going to provide you with the latest and most accurate facts about the Hubble Space telescope. Alongside facts, you’ll get to see some awesome pictures of Hubble and additional resources about it.

The Hubble Space Telescope facts below will help you understand what this telescope is, how the telescope is used, who created the Hubble Space telescope and other useful facts about it. We hope the below facts about the Hubble Space telescope are helpful and make researching it fun, while opening your imagination into space.

If any of the below hubble space telescope facts are inaccurate or out of date, please contact us and let us know.

16 Hubble Space Telescope Facts for Kids

  1. The Hubble Space Telescope is a low Earth orbit space telescope used to observe the universe.
  2. The Hubble Space Telescope is also referred to as Hubble or HST.
  3. The Hubble Space Telescope is named after Edwin P. Hubble, an American astronomer.
  4. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched from the Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24th, 1990.
  5. Hubble is still in service, and it’s end of life due to orbit decay is estimated between 2030 and 2040.
  6. Hubble weighs over 24,000 pounds and is over 43 feet long, or about the size of a school bus.
  7. The Hubble Space Telescope has a mirror that is 7.9 feet.
  8. Hubble uses two 25-foot solar panels to generate energy, which is only about 2,100 watts of power.
  9. Hubble travels at 17,500 miles per around and completes an orbit of Earth every 97 minutes.
  10. Hubble transmits on average 120 gigabytes of data every week.
  11. Hubble has four main instruments that can obverse the universe in visible, ultraviolet and near infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
  12. Hubble is not the first space telescope. However, it’s currently the largest telescope that is versatile enough to handle many different tasks for astronomers.
  13. The HST space telescope has been able to observe locations in our universe that are more than 13.4 billion light years from Earth. That gives astronomers the ability to view the universe 13.4 billion years ago.
  14. Hubble’s first image was NGC 353, a star cluster 1,300 light years from Earth.
  15. There have been five missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope, and they were in 1993, 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2009.
  16. The successor to Hubble is the James Webb Space Telescope and has a planned launch date in 2021.

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