Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying the Hubble Space Telescope, a $1.5 billion observatory designed to see the universe unobstructed by Earth's atmosphere. A flawed mirror initially crippled its images, but a dramatic 1993 shuttle repair mission fixed the defect, and Hubble went on to capture some of the most iconic images in the history of astronomy.
Named after astronomer Edwin Hubble, who proved the universe was expanding, the telescope had been decades in the making and was originally slated to launch in 1986—delayed by the Challenger disaster. When it finally reached orbit 340 miles above Earth, engineers discovered its 2.4-meter primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape by a tiny but critical error, producing blurry images that embarrassed NASA and drew late-night comedy ridicule.
In December 1993, astronauts aboard Discovery performed a intricate spacewalking repair, installing corrective optics essentially giving Hubble glasses. The fix worked spectacularly. Hubble went on to capture the Hubble Deep Field, revealing thousands of galaxies in a patch of sky once thought empty, and helped confirm the accelerating expansion of the universe, a discovery that earned a Nobel Prize.
More than three decades later, Hubble remains operational, having orbited Earth over 150,000 times and taken more than 1.5 million observations, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of cosmic distance, dark energy, and the age of the universe.