When was hubble decommissioned

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More From Forbes. Nov 12, , am EST. Nov 11, , pm EST. Nov 11, , am EST. Nov 10, , pm EST. Nov 9, , pm EST. Edit Story. Jun 21, , am EDT. I inspire people to go stargazing, watch the Moon, enjoy the night sky. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. This new glitch should be fixable. Its three decades of service are more than anyone expected, and the telescope is on its last legs from here. Hubble has been used in practically every kind of astronomy investigation: studying planets and moons in our own solar system; peering at distant stars, galaxies, supernovas, nebulas, and other astrophysical phenomena; studying the origins and expansion of the universe.

Its work in exoplanet science in the last decade has been especially surprising, considering that when the telescope was launched in , we were still five years away from detecting the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star. This is also critical when we need eyes to study poorly understood phenomena. Take the detection of gravitational waves produced by the collision of two neutron stars. Four major scientific instruments are currently active onboard Hubble, so even if one or two things stop working, there is still a ton of major science the rest of the observatory can do.

That being said, there are no plans for a new service mission. Brown says other nations have nascent plans to put other missions in orbit that could take up the visible and UV investigations currently run by Hubble. China is looking to launch a space telescope called Xuntian in , and state media says it will observe an area of space times larger than Hubble can.