JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Hubble Space Telescope's life began somewhat notoriously.
It rode to space on the now-retired Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. Everything about the launch was fine, but it was after the telescope got to space that they realized there was something wrong with its focus.
"That was huge news in the astronomical community," said NASA Director of Astrophysics Dr. Paul Hertz.
And considering the equipment was already up in space, and 350 miles above the nearest Radio Shack, they had to fix it, quite literally on the fly.
"My predecessors at NASA pulled off a miracle that was the servicing mission that put the corrective optics in," Hertz said.
The rest is history, 13.8 billion years worth.
One of the biggest discoveries Hubble has helped scientists at NASA make is the age of the universe, by measuring how quickly galaxies are moving apart from each other and "then playing that movie back in reverse," Hertz said.
Today, they've released a brand new image in celebration of the 30th anniversary.
It's called Cosmic Reef, which is a portrait of "a firestorm of star birth in a neighboring galaxy."
It's from a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located 163,000 light-years away, according to NASA.
And as for the future of the telescope, Dr. Hertz says all the technology onboard has redundancy. And while the shuttle program has been retired, and astronauts can't get up there at the moment to do repairs, he still says everything looks good onboard through the 2020s.
"Its orbit is good until the early 2040s, so we're not worried about it deorbiting."
But NASA is always thinking about the future, and right now they're planning on launching an even more powerful telescope next year called the James Webb Space Telescope.
"It's got a mirror that's about 10 times larger than the Hubble mirror," he said. "It works in the infrared, where Hubble works in the visible."
For parents who are homeschooling now, or helping their kids out with virtual school, NASA has multiple educational resources involving the Hubble and the images its taken over the last three decades.
There's also a neat feature where you enter your birthday and it'll show you an image the Hubble Telescope took on that day in a given year.