HELL'S KITCHEN — The Hubble Space Telescope is turning 25 and the Intrepid Museum is throwing it a birthday party.
Hubble@25 will be the first major temporary exhibition at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum's new Space Shuttle Pavilion, which also houses the space shuttle Enterprise.
The exhibit, which opens to the public on Oct. 23 and runs indefinitely, will celebrate the telescope's quarter century of looking out into deep space.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and has orbited the earth ever since. Because it floats outside of the Earth's image-distorting atmosphere, it can take high-resolution images of the cosmos.
The exhibition will show those images, along with a variety of Hubble-related artifacts — including tools used in space to repair the telescope. The display will even feature a basketball that belonged to Edwin Hubble, the telescope's namesake, that was taken into orbit on the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 2009.
Visitors will also be able to see photographs by Michael Soluri from his upcoming book "Infinite Worlds: The People and Places of Space Exploration," which documents the push to save and repair the Hubble in 2009.
Along with the exhibit, the museum will host a series of public educational programs, including conversations with astronauts, engineers and scientists who have worked on the Hubble.
