If you see an incredible image of deep space, chances are it came from Hubble.

Launched in 1990, Hubble is a telescope that orbits above Earth's atmosphere, beaming home images that have helped us solve some of the universe's greatest mysteries. Not only does NASA count Hubble as one of its most successful science missions, but it is also among the biggest advancements humans have ever made in space.

The Tech That Powers Hubble

Hubble orbits around Earth at about five miles per second; a complete spin takes 97 minutes. On its journey, its mirror captures light and directs it into its instruments, which then work together to provide the observation.

While Hubble provides views of deep space, it doesn't magnify distant stars, alien planets and galaxies. Instead, it collects more light than the human eye can see on its own. With a telescope, the bigger the mirror, the better the vision. Hubble's mirror is 94.5 inches in diameter, which is smaller than most Earth-based telescopes. However, Hubble's location — in low-orbit beyond our atmosphere — gives it remarkable clarity.

As any photographer knows, you have to be steady in order to take a crisp image, especially of a subject that's far away. This same concept applies to Hubble, but the difference is that the telescope doesn't have a tripod for balance. But it's still able to lock onto a target without deviating more than 7/1000th of an arcsecond — about the width of a human hair as seen from one mile away.

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The Sun's rays power Hubble's functions. It is outfitted with two 25-foot solar panels that convert sunlight into electricity. But what about when the Sun is blocked from Hubble's view? The telescope keeps some of the electricity it acquired and stores it in batteries to maintain its power while on the dark side.

Hubble has a suite of instruments on board that have been updated over the years. But the most powerful is the Wide Field Camera 3, which allows for a greater resolution than its other devices. WFC3 studies dark energy, dark matter and formation of individual stars.

The instrument has two channels: one for ultraviolet and visible light (UVIS) and the other for near infrared (NIR). Both process images differently to provide a variety of views into deep space.

You can see the difference in these two photos of the Carina Nebula. The first photo uses visible light:

This second image is of the same area in the Carina Nebula, except using near infrared:

Hubble has collected more than one million views of the universe, and it gathers about 120 gigabytes of science data every week. So, how do we get all that information back to Earth?

NASA engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland use surrounding satellites to transmit all the information going to and from Hubble. The 43-foot-long telescope has two main computers. The first one processes commands sent from NASA engineers, who point the telescope and control its other system functions. The second computer talks to Hubble's instruments to get their data. That computer then sends that information to a nearby satellite that, in turn, bounces all of it back to Earth.

Hubble's Biggest Discoveries

After almost 23 years in orbit, Hubble has changed everything we know about the universe. More than 10,000 scientific articles are published based on its data.

Hubble revealed the universe is about 13 to 14 billion years old, more accurate than our previous estimate of 10 to 20 billion years old. It also played a huge role in the discovery of dark energy, a force that caused the expansion of the universe. Determining the rate this expansion helped Hubble figure out the universe's age. But dark energy revealed something even bigger: The universe's expansion is rapidly accelerating. Figuring out why this is happening would revolutionize physics as we know it.

We've learned so much from the Hubble because it captures distance galaxies in different stages of their evolution. It takes billions of years for the light from these galaxies to reach us. So when we look at a photo from Hubble, we are, in essence, looking back in time.

When it was first launched, Hubble beamed back images that appeared blurry. So NASA had to send a crew to install corrective optics. The fix worked, and NASA released a wide-field planetary image that stunned the world to prove it.

"Just from seeing that one picture you knew that this was going to be a revolutionary telescope," said Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in a 2011 interview.

After the fix, Hubble began collecting observations from a small region in Ursa Major for 10 consecutive days in December 1995. Scientists then stitched together 342 of these images to create what is know famously known as the Hubble Deep Field, which shows almost 3,000 galaxies.

In 2004 the Hubble Ultra Deep Field was released, and it remains the deepest portrait of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind. Taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board Hubble, the crisp image reveals 10,000 galaxies. These galaxies were the first to emerge from the dark ages, a period of time that scientists say came "shortly after the Big Bang when the first stars reheated the cold, dim universe."

Hubble made headlines again last year when NASA released the ultimate view into space, appropriately called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field. While it's not a new set of observations, it's the most comprehensive — combining into one photo more than 2,000 images taken at the same spot over a period of 10 years.

This January, NASA announced plans to image six new views of the universe that could once again revolutionize astronomy. The Hubble Frontier Fields will collect light for about 45 hours each, spread over a period of three years. Objects that existed in the first 500 million years after the Big Bang will appear in this images.

Who Owns Hubble?

The $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope is a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and Space Telescope Science Institute (an American organization established in 1981). NASA named it after American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who confirmed an "expanding" universe, providing the foundation for the Big Bang Theory.

Part of the reason that Hubble has been responsible for so many remarkable discoveries is that its a shared piece of equipment. While NASA is responsible for its overall health, astronomers from around the world get to use Hubble.

However, access to Hubble doesn't come easy. It's a very competitive process in which a review committee of astronomy experts cherry-pick the best proposals of how astronomers will spend precious time with the telescope. According to NASA, the experts review 1,000 proposals and select the best 200.

While the world's most famous telescope is still very much active, the aging Hubble already has a successor in the works. The James Webb Space Telescope will launch in 2018 to find the first galaxies that formed in the early universe. It will connect the Big Bang to our own Milky Way Galaxy.