There’s plenty to celebrate today as the Hubble Space Telescope turns 19 years old: The billion-dollar orbiting observatory is still in business, even though some people thought it should have failed by now.

And after years and months of delay, it looks as if help is finally on the way. The shuttle Atlantis is set to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of belated birthday gifts next month.

Since the telescope’s launch aboard the shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990, Hubble has traveled 2.8 billion miles in space during more than 100,000 orbits around the earth. More than 570,000 pictures have been taken of about 29,000 celestial objects. The data transmissions sent back from Hubble add up to almost 39 trillion bytes – twice as much as all the data contained in all the books in the Library of Congress.

You can find these and other fun facts on the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Hubble trivia page. You’ll also find a rundown of Hubble’s top discoveries to date – including insights into the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the speed-up of our expanding universe and the development of galaxies, stars and planets.

Just in the past month, Hubble has delivered a new batch of beauties, including its 19th-anniversary picture of a galactic “fountain of youth,” a stunning view of an intergalactic smashup and a “People’s Choice” picture of a three-galaxy traffic jam.

[ Source MSNBC ]