50 free Hubble Space Telescope trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Hubble Space Telescope trivia quiz covers the observatory from Lyman Spitzer's 1946 paper to its predicted retirement. It walks through the funding fights of the 1970s, the shrinking mirror, Perkin-Elmer's mis-assembled null corrector, the 1990 launch on Discovery, the spherical aberration that turned a triumph into a punchline, and the five shuttle servicing missions that fixed and upgraded it, ending with Atlantis in 2009. It also celebrates the science: the Hubble Deep Field and Ultra-Deep Field, the Pillars of Creation, Shoemaker–Levy 9 hitting Jupiter, Pluto's fifth moon, the accelerating universe and the Hubble constant, plus the people — Edwin Hubble himself, Nancy Grace Roman, Story Musgrave, John Grunsfeld and Robert Williams. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who follows space news; the rest reward real telescope nerds. Our physics and space pages carry on from here. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's Hubble articles and the NASA histories they cite, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year was the Hubble Space Telescope launched?
1990
It went up on Space Shuttle Discovery on 24 April, seven years later than originally intended.
Q 02Which Space Shuttle carried Hubble into orbit on mission STS-31?
Discovery
The mission had to wait for shuttle flights to resume after the 1986 Challenger disaster.
Q 03What is the diameter of Hubble's primary mirror?
2.4 metres
The 3-metre design was shrunk to save money; the mirror was polished to an accuracy of 10 nanometres.
Q 04What flaw did Hubble turn out to have when it reached orbit in 1990?
Its mirror had been ground to a bad shape
The spherical aberration was traced to a mis-assembled testing device called a null corrector at Perkin-Elmer.
Q 05Which company built Hubble's flawed optical telescope assembly?
Perkin-Elmer
NASA had made it subcontract a back-up mirror to Kodak, which was never launched and now sits in the National Air and Space Museum.
Q 06What did the Allen Commission find had caused the mirror flaw?
A mis-assembled null corrector
Two conventional null correctors used earlier had actually flagged the problem, but were dismissed as less accurate.
Q 07Which 1993 shuttle mission installed corrective optics that fixed Hubble's vision?
STS-61
Endeavour's crew, led on the spacewalks by Story Musgrave, worked over ten days in December.
Q 08What was the name of the corrective optics package installed on the first servicing mission?
COSTAR
It was not a science instrument, but it took up one of the four axial instrument bays; it is now in the Smithsonian.
Q 09How many Space Shuttle servicing missions visited Hubble?
5
Hubble is the only telescope ever designed to be maintained by astronauts in space, and every main instrument has been replaced.
Q 10The final servicing mission was cancelled on safety grounds after which event, then reinstated?
The 2003 Columbia disaster
NASA administrator Michael Griffin overturned the cancellation, and Atlantis flew the mission in May 2009.
Q 11Which shuttle flew the last Hubble servicing mission in May 2009?
Atlantis
It installed Wide Field Camera 3, which replaced the camera that had itself replaced the original in 1993.
Q 12Which astronaut led the spacewalks on the first Hubble servicing mission?
Story Musgrave
NASA paired him with six other experienced astronauts, including two from the Intelsat rescue mission STS-49.
Q 13Which astronomer-astronaut serviced Hubble on STS-103 and STS-109, doing five spacewalks in total across the two?
John Grunsfeld
He later became NASA's associate administrator for science.
Q 21Which international partner gave Hubble funding, solar cells and an instrument for observing time?
The European Space Agency
European astronomers were guaranteed at least 15% of the telescope's time.
Q 22What was the observatory provisionally called before it was named after Edwin Hubble in 1983?
The Large Space Telescope
The 1968 plan called for a 3-metre mirror and a 1979 launch.
Q 23Which Baltimore-based body selects Hubble's targets and processes its data?
The Space Telescope Science Institute
Q 14Hubble is named after Edwin Hubble, who confirmed which finding in 1929?
The universe is expanding
Georges Lemaître had proposed it two years earlier; the telescope was named in 1983.
Q 15At which observatory did Edwin Hubble make his famous discoveries after Hale hired him?
Mount Wilson
There he found Cepheid variables in the Andromeda and Triangulum nebulae, proving they were separate galaxies.
Q 16What did Edwin Hubble study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, keeping a promise to his dying father?
Law
He also led the University of Chicago basketball team to a Big Ten title in 1907.
Q 17Why was Edwin Hubble never awarded a Nobel?
The physics prize did not then cover astronomy
A model of the telescope now stands in his home town of Marshfield, Missouri.
Q 18Whose 1946 paper 'Astronomical advantages of an extraterrestrial observatory' begins Hubble's history?
Lyman Spitzer
He argued a space telescope would beat atmospheric 'seeing' and could observe ultraviolet and infrared light; the infrared Great Observatory was later named for him.
Q 19Which NASA astronomer is known as the 'Mother of Hubble'?
Nancy Grace Roman
She lobbied Congress through the 1970s and set up the program's steering committee; a successor telescope now bears her name.
Q 20Which German rocketry pioneer's 1923 book first mentioned launching a telescope into orbit?
Hermann Oberth
Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen came out two decades before Spitzer's paper.
Goddard flies the spacecraft; STScI sits on the Johns Hopkins campus.
Q 24Hubble is one of NASA's four Great Observatories. Which of these is NOT one of the others?
Kepler
Compton covered gamma rays, Chandra X-rays and Spitzer the infrared; all four launched between 1990 and 2003.
Q 25The Hubble Deep Field of 1995 imaged a tiny patch of which constellation?
Ursa Major
342 exposures over ten days revealed some 3,000 galaxies in a patch the size of a tennis ball at 100 metres.
Q 26Roughly how many objects, almost all galaxies, appear in the original Hubble Deep Field?
3,000
Only a handful of foreground Milky Way stars fall within it.
Q 27Which Space Telescope Science Institute director used his own discretionary time to create the 1995 Deep Field?
Robert Williams
Colleagues warned it might show nothing; it became one of the most famous images in astronomy.
Q 28The 2004 Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, with about 10,000 galaxies, lies in which southern constellation?
Fornax
It caught light from galaxies as they were 400 to 800 million years after the Big Bang.
Q 29The famous 'Pillars of Creation' photograph shows columns of gas and dust in which star-forming region?
The Eagle Nebula
Taken on 1 April 1995 by Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen, the pillars are being eroded by light from newly formed stars.
Q 30Which comet's 1994 collision with Jupiter was 'fortuitously timed' for the newly repaired Hubble?
Shoemaker–Levy 9
The impacts came just months after the first servicing mission restored the optics.