The Hubble Space Telescope, a NASA and ESA project, was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard Space Shuttle Discovery. The mission took place a few short years after the Challenger disaster, which blew a sizeable hole in NASA's reputation for technical competence.

Hubble was built with a number of instruments onboard, including the Wide Field Planetary Camera (WFPC), the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS), the Faint Object Camera (FOC), the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS) and the High Speed Photometer (HSP).

In the years since, Hubble has gathered more than 1.6 million observations and 430 terabytes of data. The telescope has revealed that supermassive black holes nestle at the heart of most large galaxies,