Hubble Space Telescope Trivia
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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
Hubble was launched on 24 April 1990, seven years after the 1983 date first planned, following programme delays and the grounding of the shuttle fleet after the 1986 Challenger disaster.
Q 02Which Space Shuttle carried Hubble into orbit on mission STS-31?
Discovery
Discovery lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on 24 April and released Hubble the next day at about 600 km, the highest shuttle orbit up to then; the flight had been delayed by the 1986 Challenger grounding.
Q 03What is the diameter of Hubble's primary mirror?
2.4 metres
The primary mirror is 2.4 metres across, reduced from the 3-metre design of the 1970s to cut costs; the blank is ultra-low-expansion glass with a lightweight honeycomb core.
Q 04What flaw did Hubble turn out to have when it reached orbit?
Its mirror had been ground to a bad shape
Its mirror had been ground to a bad shape: the edge was too flat by about 2.2 micrometres, producing spherical aberration that smeared starlight into fuzzy haloes when the first images arrived in May, weeks after launch.
Q 05Which company built Hubble's flawed optical telescope assembly?
Perkin-Elmer
Perkin-Elmer won the optical telescope assembly contract in 1977 and figured the primary mirror at its Danbury, Connecticut plant; NASA had required it to subcontract a back-up mirror to Kodak, which was never flown.
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
STS-61 saw Endeavour's crew make five spacewalks in December 1993, replacing the original camera and inserting corrective optics, along with new solar arrays and gyroscopes.
Q 08What was the name of the corrective optics package installed on the first servicing mission?
COSTAR
COSTAR, the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement, deployed small mirrors to correct the light reaching the remaining instruments; it displaced the High Speed Photometer and was removed in 2009 once every instrument carried its own correction.
Q 09How many Space Shuttle servicing missions visited Hubble?
5
Hubble received 5 shuttle servicing missions, SM1 in 1993, SM2 in 1997, SM3A in 1999, SM3B in 2002 and SM4 in 2009, each delivering new instruments, gyroscopes or solar arrays.
Q 10The final servicing mission was cancelled on safety grounds after which event, then reinstated?
The 2003 Columbia disaster
The 2003 Columbia disaster led administrator Sean O'Keefe to cancel the mission in January 2004 as too risky; his successor Michael Griffin reinstated it in October 2006, with a second shuttle on standby for rescue.
Q 11Which shuttle flew the last Hubble servicing mission in May 2009?
Atlantis
Atlantis flew STS-125 in May 2009, the final servicing mission, whose five spacewalks installed Wide Field Camera 3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and repaired two older instruments.
Q 12Which astronaut led the spacewalks on the first Hubble servicing mission?
Story Musgrave
Story Musgrave, a physician who served as payload commander, led the spacewalk team on the December 1993 flight, going outside with Jeffrey Hoffman while Tom Akers and Kathryn Thornton took the alternate days.
Q 13Which astronomer-astronaut serviced Hubble on STS-103 and STS-109, doing five spacewalks in total across the two?
John Grunsfeld
Q 21Which international partner supplied Hubble's solar arrays and an instrument in return for observing time?
The European Space Agency
The European Space Agency contributed the Faint Object Camera and the original solar arrays, and in return European astronomers were guaranteed at least 15% of Hubble's observing time.
Q 22What was the observatory provisionally called before it was named after Edwin Hubble in 1983?
The Large Space Telescope
The Large Space Telescope, or LST, was the working name in NASA's 1968 plans, which called for a 3-metre mirror and a launch in 1979; the observatory was renamed for Edwin Hubble in 1983.
Q 23Which Baltimore-based body selects Hubble's targets and processes its data?
John Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist, flew on STS-103 in 1999 and STS-109 in 2002 and returned on the final servicing mission in 2009; he was NASA's associate administrator for science from 2012 to 2016.
Q 14Edwin Hubble was born in 1889 in which US state?
Missouri
Missouri was his birthplace: Edwin Hubble was born in Marshfield on 20 November 1889 and moved with his family to Wheaton, Illinois, in 1900, where he starred in high-school athletics before entering the University of Chicago.
Q 15At which observatory did Edwin Hubble make his famous discoveries after Hale hired him?
Mount Wilson
Mount Wilson, above Pasadena, had the 100-inch Hooker telescope, then the world's largest, with which Hubble found Cepheid variables in the Andromeda and Triangulum nebulae in 1923-24 and showed they were separate galaxies.
Q 16What did Edwin Hubble study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, keeping a promise to his dying father?
Law
Law was his Oxford subject: Hubble read jurisprudence at Queen's College from 1910 to 1913 to satisfy his father, then after the elder Hubble's death in 1913 returned to astronomy as a graduate student at Yerkes Observatory.
Q 17Why was Edwin Hubble never awarded a Nobel?
The physics prize did not then cover astronomy
The physics prize did not then cover astronomy, so Hubble spent his final years lobbying for astronomers to be treated as physicists; he died of a stroke in September 1953 with no award made.
Q 18Whose 1946 paper 'Astronomical advantages of an extraterrestrial observatory' begins Hubble's history?
Lyman Spitzer
Lyman Spitzer, a Princeton astrophysicist, wrote the 1946 RAND report arguing that a telescope above the atmosphere would escape the blurring astronomers call 'seeing'; he then lobbied for the project for decades.
Q 19Which NASA astronomer is known as the 'Mother of Hubble'?
Nancy Grace Roman
Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief of astronomy, spent the 1960s and 1970s building scientific and congressional support for a large space telescope; the Roman Space Telescope was named for her in 2020.
Q 20Which German rocketry pioneer's 1923 book first mentioned launching a telescope into orbit?
Hermann Oberth
Hermann Oberth's 'Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen' ('The Rocket into Planetary Space'), published in 1923, suggested that a telescope in orbit could escape atmospheric distortion; his pupil Wernher von Braun later led NASA's Saturn V programme.
The Space Telescope Science Institute
The Space Telescope Science Institute, set up in 1981 on the Johns Hopkins University campus in Baltimore, runs the observing programme and archives the data, while Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland flies the spacecraft.
Q 24Which of these was NOT one of NASA's four Great Observatories alongside Hubble?
Kepler
Kepler, launched in 2009 to hunt exoplanets by watching for transits, was not part of the programme; the Great Observatories were Hubble, Compton for gamma rays, Chandra for X-rays and Spitzer for the infrared.
Q 25The Hubble Deep Field of 1995 imaged a tiny patch of which constellation?
Ursa Major
Ursa Major was chosen because the field near the Big Dipper's handle is far from the Galactic plane, nearly empty of bright stars and visible to Hubble continuously; 342 exposures were taken over ten days in December 1995.
Q 26Roughly how many objects, almost all galaxies, appear in the original Hubble Deep Field?
3,000
About 3,000 objects, nearly all galaxies, were counted in the image, with only a handful of foreground Milky Way stars in the field; some galaxies appear as they were more than 10 billion years ago.
Q 27Which institute director used his own discretionary time to create the 1995 Hubble Deep Field?
Robert Williams
Robert Williams, director of the institute from 1993 to 1998, committed his director's discretionary time to the project despite colleagues' warnings that the field might show nothing; the image became one of astronomy's most famous.
Q 28The 2004 Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, with about 10,000 galaxies, lies in which southern constellation?
Fornax
Fornax, a faint southern constellation bordered by Eridanus, holds the Ultra-Deep Field, a patch imaged for about a million seconds of exposure between September 2003 and January 2004.
Q 29The famous 'Pillars of Creation' photograph shows columns of gas and dust in which star-forming region?
The Eagle Nebula
The Eagle Nebula, Messier 16 in the constellation Serpens about 7,000 light-years away, contains the pillars, photographed on 1 April 1995 by Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen; light from nearby young stars is slowly eroding them.
Q 30Which comet's 1994 collision with Jupiter was 'fortuitously timed' for the newly repaired Hubble?
Shoemaker–Levy 9
Shoemaker–Levy 9, torn into more than 20 fragments, struck the planet between 16 and 22 July 1994, seven months after the first servicing mission restored the optics; the impact scars were more prominent than the Great Red Spot.