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It moves at 5 miles a second, itÂ’s spent 18 years in orbit, travelled 2.72 billion miles and this coming Monday; the Hubble telescope passes another landmark with its 100,000th orbit of the planet.
Preparations are well underway for the October launch of the latest and last shuttle mission to service and upgrade the telescope. The mission is also the final flight of the Atlantis orbiter and will last 11 days with five separate spacewalks to repair and upgrade the scope once it has been captured.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL & ESA.
The image here depicts the STS-125 mission patch with an artists impression of one of Hubble’s most recent and important discoveries, the first detection ever of organic molecules in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet. This breakthrough is an important step in eventually identifying signs of life on a planet outside our own system.
The molecule found by Hubble is methane, which under the right circumstances can play a key role in prebiotic chemistry - the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life as we know it. This illustration depicts the planet HD 189733b with its parent star peeking above its top edge.