Sun-Splashed Hubble

Photograph courtesy NASA

Sunlight glints off the Hubble Space Telescope as it sits suspended over the cargo bay of space shuttle Discovery during a February 1997 servicing mission. It was during this mission that astronauts installed Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), which used technology not available when Hubble was launched in 1990 to provide some of the most stunningly detailed images of faraway galaxies and nebulae.