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Hubble issues 25th birthday image
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32433839Hubble issues 25th birthday image
Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent
23 April 2015
The Hubble Space Telescope has celebrated its silver anniversary with a picture featuring a spectacular vista of young stars blazing across a dense cloud of gas and dust. The "Westerlund 2" cluster of stars is located about 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina.
Hubble was launched on Space Shuttle Discovery on 24 April, 1990. Engineers expect the observatory to keep operating for at least another five years.
(snip)
The goal is to reach back as far as possible towards the time when the first stars and galaxies were forming, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
And this work will neatly hand the baton to its successor - the much bigger James Webb Space Telescope.
Due for launch in 2018, JWST is being tuned specifically to investigate this early epoch. And it will do in hours the tasks that currently take Hubble many days to complete.
