HST : Eye on the universe!
I don’t want to confuse you, but… Please don’t consider any steak of light in the nights sky as a Meteor without confirming! In my earlier post, I mentioned about the appearance of a meteor (shooting star) as a fleeting flash of light in the night sky.
BUT
I am thrilled to let you know that the Streak of light seen in the above image is NOT a meteor.
It's actually The Hubble Space Telescope!
Hubble Space Telescope is a space telescope that was launched from space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. It is the length of a large school bus and weighs as much as two adult elephants. Hubble travels about 5 miles per second.
Earth’s atmosphere alters and blocks the light that comes from space. Hubble orbits above Earth’s atmosphere, which gives it a better view of the universe than telescopes have at ground level.
The telescope’s first few images came back so blurry that they were close to useless. Hubble's main mirror had a defect — a spherical aberration caused by a manufacturing error. The flaw was minute, at just 1/50th the thickness of a sheet of paper, but that was big enough to cause major imaging problems.
It took three years before NASA could mount a repair mission. On Dec. 2, 1993, the Space Shuttle Endeavor ferried a crew of seven to fix Hubble during five days of spacewalks. Two new cameras, including the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC-2) — which later took many of Hubble's most famous photos — were installed during the fix. In December 1993, the first new images from Hubble reached Earth, and they were breathtaking.