Hubble Quotations

Even with an improperly ground mirror, the Hubble delivered extraordinary images. When the flaw was corrected, the Hubble delivered images of transcendent beauty and value for many years. So too 'Terra Nova.' Even in its flawed first season, each episode was full of marvelous moments and beautiful images.

The great spirals... apparently lie outside our stellar system.

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

Ironically, it is only when disaster strikes that the shuttle makes the headlines. Its routine flights attracted less media interest than unmanned probes to the planets or the images from the Hubble Telescope. The fate of Columbia (like that of Challenger in 1986) reminded us that space is still a hazardous environment.

It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.

I feel privileged and honored to have flown. It's been a tremendous ride, looking back on the legacy and accomplishments, like the Hubble telescope and the launching of the International Space Station in 1998.

I am confident that Americans of all walks of life will come to the defense of the Hubble and cause the Congress to restore the repair of the telescope to the NASA budget.

Hubble has always been this icon in terms of a mission assignment.

Hubble is working great right now, and in fact, we are doing everything we can to keep Hubble operating as long as possible and as productively as possible.

Suddenly whole new programs open up, things you can do that you could never do before. It'd be great scientifically, it'd be great for the nation, for educators, for students, and it'd be just great for the public at large, because Hubble is so exciting for people.

We have one request, ... We'd like you to send a note to Hubble to get ready, because we're on our way!

That's the job Hubble had to do at the moon. It was a noteworthy undertaking. This is in some sense the miracle on the moon.

We can't tell you all our secrets, but we're looking forward to the deploy of Hubble and if we have a chance to say hello to our families, we'll definitely take advantage of that,

Hubble is very close to my heart, and going back to Hubble, because I was there once already in 1993, is really a great privilege for me.

What makes Hubble worthwhile, ... is putting in new science instruments that have state-of-the-art detectors to really make the leaps forward...what we call the 'science discovery factor.' Those are the things that are really going to make Hubble a useful and desirable space research vehicle beyond the 2008 time frame.

These sorts of results show how spectacular and unique Hubble is.

The projected life of Hubble batteries has been extended. We used to say we thought they were good until 2008-2009. Now we're thinking 2010. We think Hubble will remain serviceable until well into 2010based on latest projections and test data we have.

We went out in October to image both rings and we simply couldn't see the outer one. We should have easily seen it if it was a normal ring. The interesting part was that the outer ring was the one that was the brighter one in the Hubble images.

Orion is a bustling cauldron of activity. This new large-scale Hubble image of the region reveals a treasure-house of beauty and astonishing detail for comprehensive scientific study.

President Nixon cancelled in 1973 the Hubble Telescope while it was still in the development phase. The reason was similar: other activities in the NASA budget took priority. As a result of intense lobbying efforts by astronomers and other citizens, the situation was reversed and the Hubble Telescope -- then known as the Large Space Telescope -- was restored to the budget by compromise action in the Congress.

Precisely because of Hubble's extraordinary contributions in the past and promised contributions in the future, I... believe it is important that the decision to cancel the planned servicing mission to Hubble be reviewed by an independent panel of experts and all options for safely carrying it out be examined.

The wealth of information in this Hubble survey, including seeing stars of all sizes in one dense place, provides an extraordinary opportunity to study star formation. Our goal is to calculate the masses and ages for these young stars so that we can map their history and get a general census of the star formation in that region. We can then sort the stars by mass and age and look for trends.

I love this chance to cut away from Carl and really show the most visually dazzling concepts. The Hubble didn't even exist then, and we've leaned heavily on Hubble images here.

That's driven principally by the gyros. And right now, we're saying we think we're good until the middle of 2008, ... Hubble will still be worth servicing as long as the batteries hold out.

It's very important, especially during a Hubble mission, that we have a lot of photographic evidence of the condition of the telescope.

All you have to do is look at the textbooks, ... They are being rewritten page by page, Hubble image after Hubble image.

The Hubble Space Telescope can discriminate very subtle color differences on the surface.

The Mars Pathfinder (landing in 1997) caught everyone's attention. Hubble photos have just captured the public imagination and had maybe more magazine covers than even John Glenn.