Astronomers around the world last weekend marked the 20th anniversary of the launching of the iconic Hubble, NASA's first orbiting space telescope that has revolutionized human understanding of the universe.

More than any other instrument, the Hubble has stimulated a modern-day infatuation with deep space, beaming to Earth the most spectacular images ever taken of faraway galaxies and the births and deaths of stars -- and along the way helping scientists make some of the most important discoveries of our time.

Hubble was launched aboard space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990 and deployed into orbit the following day.

Piloting the shuttle on that historic mission was astronaut Charles Bolden, who went on to become the US space agency's administrator last year.

In the two decades since, Hubble has enabled astronomers to peer through the celestial curtain to set the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years old.

"Hubble is undoubtedly one of the most recognized and successful scientific projects in history," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

From its unique perch some 570 kilometers (353 miles) above Earth, the telescope is our eye on the cosmos, snapping pictures of more than 30,000 celestial objects, some of them located on the far ends of the universe.

The quality of Hubble images is 10 times clearer than pictures from the most powerful ground-based telescopes, because it is beyond the Earth's atmosphere, which distorts the view of ground telescopes.

"It's that extreme clarity that gives us the feeling we've traveled out into space to see these objects," said Jon Grunsfeld, an astronaut who did repair work on Hubble during two shuttle missions.

"It really is our time machine."

Its successor is the James Webb Space Telescope, an infrared optimized space observatory scheduled to be deployed in 2014.

(Read by Nelly Min. Nelly Min is a multimedia journalist at the China Daily Web site.)

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(Agencies)