The history of Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope has cost U.S. taxpayers some $10 billion in the quarter century since the project was approved. But to astronomers around the world, the high-flying satellite is, in a word, priceless.

The solar-powered spacecraft has helped astronomers confirm the existence of super massive black holes, pin down the true age of the universe and spot the faint building blocks of the first galaxies as they collided, merged and grew just a billion years or so after the birth of the cosmos.

Its mind-bending photographs have charted the life cycles of distant suns in unprecedented detail, providing unmatched views of the vast stellar nurseries where stars are born to the supernova bangs and whimpers marking old age and death.

It has catalogued myriad infant solar systems in the process of forming planets and provided flyby-class views of the outer planets in Earth's own solar system, routinely capturing phenomena as common as dust storms on Mars to once-in-a-lifetime events like the 1994 crash of a comet into the atmosphere of Jupiter.