The Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most remarkable tools ever deployed by NASA to study the depths of space, has dazzled astronomers and scientists ever since its arrival into space by the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1990.
The telescope, named after the legendary twentieth century astronomer Edwin Hubble, bypasses the distortion caused by Earth’s atmosphere in seeing the details of galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The Hubble Space Telescope is considered one of the most important scientific instruments ever engineered by man.
On April 10, 2000, the United States Postal Service commemorated the ten year anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's launch into orbit and honored the life of the telescope’s namesake Edwin Powell Hubble by issuing a set of five stamps. The stamps featured “visual representations of data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that have been processed, and in some cases colorized, for scientific purposes.”
