Its price tag was $500 million in 1990. It was certainly a lot of money to pay for a telescope that circled the Earth and couldn’t focus. A faulty mirror on Hubble was the reason the expensive space telescope couldn’t see. Hubble would quickly become the object of ridicule and the subject of numerous pranks on late-night television.

In 1993, astronauts fixed that faulty mirror on Hubble. Fifteen years later, it’s pretty safe to say that no one is laughing now. In fact, even though the cost of the telescope has eclipsed $5 billion, it has become a very inexpensive investment in astronomy and our understanding of outer space over time.

For more than a decade, the Hubble Telescope has captured many of the most spectacular images of outer space. In addition, it allowed direct observation of the Universe as it was billions of years ago, discovered black holes at the center of galaxies, provided measurements that helped establish the size and age of the Universe, and offered evidence that the expansion of the Universe it’s actually speeding up.

However, even though the telescope’s last planned servicing mission is scheduled for October this year, Hubble’s best images of the Universe may be yet to come. Hubble is about to receive a powerful capability upgrade during an eleven-day shuttle mission that will feature five spacewalks. Spacewalks will be necessary for astronauts to install new scientific instruments to improve the telescope. NASA intends for the Hubble Telescope to get a wider, more distant, and sharper view of objects.

During the mission, Hubble will receive a new set of gyroscopes that will stabilize the telescope, and batteries and thermal blankets to extend Hubble’s operational life until at least 2013. In addition, a degraded fine-guidance sensor unit, one of three aboard Hubble, will be replaced by a revamped unit to help maintain the telescope’s ability to point and focus astronomical objects throughout the Universe.

The Hubble Telescope is responsible for dating the age of the Universe to 12-14 billion years. However, he cannot see that far back in time. You cannot see the period after the Big Bang when the Universe began an expansion that continues to accelerate to this day. It is important to our further understanding of the Universe that scientists now see that time in distant space. The years after the Big Bang are known for the formation of the first stars and the creation of the first galaxies. In effect, seeing this happen is a scientific search for the edge of the Universe. It’s a search that will be carried out by Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The successor to Hubble, scheduled for launch in 2013, will be designed to see objects even further away in distance and therefore in time than Hubble is now. However, for the James Webb Space Telescope to be able to see objects at the edge of the Universe after the Big Bang, it will have to be a very different telescope than Hubble.

So, in 2013, an unmanned spacecraft will launch the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) into an orbit 930,000 miles from Earth. This distance places the telescope well beyond the range of space shuttle servicing missions, and therefore the telescope is expected to have a much shorter lifespan than Hubble.

After entering its orbit, a light shield the size of a tennis court will be deployed to hide the JWST from sunlight. Finally, powerful cooling systems will help drastically reduce the spacecraft’s temperature to -447 degrees Fahrenheit so it’s cool enough to complete its mission.

The James Webb telescope will carry three different types of cameras, all tuned to detect infrared light, which is invisible to the naked eye. By contrast, Hubble was equipped to capture mostly visible light and the ultraviolet parts of the spectrum. This difference in light spectrum is due to the fact that the further back astronomers go in time, the redder the light from objects appears to be. Scientists call this phenomenon redshift, and it means that the light from the most distant (and therefore oldest) object is in the deep infrared part of the light spectrum, a part of the light spectrum that Hubble cannot currently see.

The main goal of the James Webb Telescope will be to see what happened when the Universe created its first light when it was around a billion years old. The telescope is expected to allow astronomers to observe the birth of galaxies, the physics of star and planet formation, and the entire early development of the Universe. The information could also provide answers about how other solar systems form and evolve.

Hubble was the pioneer in the search for outer space through time. James Webb is designed to look further back to the point of first light. It is a scientific quest to see the edge of the Universe, a view from the distant past that will increase our understanding of space, for the world of tomorrow.