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 01Hubble lifted off in April 1990 from which US state?
Florida
Florida's Kennedy Space Center sent Hubble up aboard a shuttle on 24 April 1990, seven years later than once planned, after budget trouble and the grounding of the whole fleet in 1986.
Q 02Which Space Shuttle carried Hubble into orbit on mission STS-31?
Discovery
Discovery got Hubble up at the second attempt: a countdown two weeks earlier had been halted just four minutes before liftoff by a faulty valve.
Q 03What is the diameter of Hubble's primary mirror?
2.4 metres
2.4 metres is modest for a great telescope: the mirror was shrunk from a planned 3 metres to save money in the 1970s, and Hubble's sharp sight comes from sitting above the air, not from its size.
Q 04What flaw did Hubble 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, enough to smear starlight into fuzzy haloes instead of sharp points.
Q 05Which company built Hubble's flawed optical telescope assembly?
Perkin-Elmer
Perkin-Elmer shaped the mirror with new computer-controlled polishers, so NASA made it order a back-up from Kodak in case the new method failed; the spare never flew.
Q 06What did investigators find had caused Hubble's mirror flaw?
A wrongly assembled test device
A wrongly assembled test device was to blame: one lens in the instrument used to check the mirror sat 1.3 mm out of place, and it was found still set that way nine years later.
Q 07In the 1991 comedy The Naked Gun 2½, a picture of Hubble hangs on a wall among images of what?
Famous disasters
Famous disasters share the wall: the film hung the newly launched Hubble beside the Titanic and the Hindenburg, a jab at its blurry first pictures that the 1993 repair turned around.
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, swung small mirrors into the light path; it was taken out in 2009, once every newer instrument carried its own correction.
Q 09Hubble is about the size of what?
School bus
A large school bus is NASA's comparison: Hubble is about 13 metres long and weighs more than 11 tonnes, sized to ride into orbit inside a space shuttle's cargo bay.
Q 10The final servicing mission was cancelled on safety grounds after which event, then reinstated?
The 2003 Columbia disaster
The 2003 Columbia disaster led NASA chief Sean O'Keefe to cancel the visit as too risky; a robot repair was studied and judged not feasible before his successor Michael Griffin sent astronauts back.
Q 11Why did a second shuttle stand ready on the pad during Hubble's last servicing mission in 2009?
To rescue the crew
To rescue the crew: from Hubble's orbit the astronauts could not reach the space station for shelter if their ship was damaged, so Endeavour stood by to fetch all seven.
Q 12Which astronaut led the spacewalks on the first Hubble servicing mission?
Story Musgrave
Story Musgrave, a physician turned astronaut, led the two alternating pairs of spacewalkers who went outside on five days in December 1993, then a record for one shuttle flight.
Q 13Which astronomer-astronaut flew to Hubble on three servicing missions, the last in 2009?
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 built one of the first cameras and the solar arrays; those first arrays flexed each time Hubble crossed from sunlight into shadow, shaking the telescope, and were swapped out in 1993.
Q 22What was the observatory provisionally called before it was named after Edwin Hubble in 1983?
The Large Space Telescope
The Large Space Telescope was the working name in NASA's 1968 plans, which pencilled in a launch for 1979; funding fights and a grounded shuttle fleet pushed the real one back eleven years.
Q 23Which Baltimore-based body selects Hubble's targets and processes its data?
John Grunsfeld repaired Hubble in 1999, 2002 and 2009, then returned to NASA in 2012 to run its whole science programme, the telescope he had mended included.
Q 14In the 1920s Edwin Hubble proved that the Andromeda 'nebula' was really what?
A galaxy beyond our own
A galaxy beyond our own: Hubble picked out pulsing stars in Andromeda whose faintness put it far outside the Milky Way, ending the belief that our galaxy was the whole universe.
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, and with it Hubble could pick out single stars in the faint, fuzzy patches then called nebulae.
Q 16What did Edwin Hubble study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, to please his father?
Law
Law was his Oxford subject, taken up to meet his father's expectations; after his father died in 1913 Hubble dropped it and went back to astronomy, earning a doctorate at Chicago.
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: Hubble lobbied for years to have astronomers counted as physicists, and he died in 1953 without the prize.
Q 18Whose 1946 paper 'Astronomical advantages of an extraterrestrial observatory' begins Hubble's history?
Lyman Spitzer
Lyman Spitzer argued in 1946 that a telescope above the atmosphere would escape its blurring, then lobbied for almost 30 years until the project was funded.
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 winning over astronomers and Congress to a telescope in orbit; a newer NASA observatory now carries her name.
Q 20Which German rocketry pioneer's 1923 book suggested launching a telescope into orbit?
Hermann Oberth
Hermann Oberth's 'The Rocket into Planetary Space' began as a doctoral thesis his university rejected, so he helped pay to have it printed as a book.
The Space Telescope Science Institute
The Space Telescope Science Institute, on the Johns Hopkins campus, referees a fierce contest for Hubble's time: about 150 scientists from around the world rank the rival proposals.
Q 24Which X-ray telescope, launched in 1999, was one of NASA's four Great Observatories alongside Hubble?
Chandra
Chandra took the X-ray slot: each Great Observatory watched a different kind of light, and pointing two or more at one object showed far more than any single view.
Q 25The Hubble Deep Field of 1995 imaged a tiny patch of which constellation?
Ursa Major
Ursa Major was chosen because the spot lies far from the Milky Way's crowded plane and never slips behind the Earth as Hubble orbits, so the telescope could stare at it for ten days running.
Q 26Roughly how many objects, almost all galaxies, appear in the original Hubble Deep Field?
3,000
3,000 or so turned up in a spot the team had picked because it looked almost empty from the ground; the faintest are galaxies seen as they were when the universe was young.
Q 27The patch of sky in the 1995 Hubble Deep Field is about as wide as what held at arm's length?
A pinhead
A pinhead at arm's length would cover it, yet institute director Robert Williams spent ten days of his own telescope time on that spot, and it proved to be crowded with galaxies.
Q 28The 2004 Hubble Ultra-Deep Field lies in which southern constellation?
Fornax
Fornax holds the Ultra-Deep Field, where a million-second exposure caught about 10,000 galaxies, the faintest of them shining within a billion years of the Big Bang.
Q 29The famous 'Pillars of Creation' photograph shows columns of gas and dust in which star-forming region?
The Eagle Nebula
The Eagle Nebula holds the pillars, which Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen photographed in 1995; fierce light from young stars nearby is slowly wearing the columns away.
Q 30Which comet's 1994 collision with Jupiter was 'fortuitously timed' for the newly repaired Hubble?
Shoemaker–Levy 9
Shoemaker–Levy 9, already torn into 21 pieces, hit the planet over six days in July 1994, months after Hubble's repair; the dark scars it left were easier to see than the Great Red Spot.