Twenty-five years on: Hubble’s unsung heroes

The director of a new documentary on the Hubble space telescope reflects on the craftsmanship behind the planet's most celebrated science instrument

In a darkened room at Nasa's Goddard Space Centre in Maryland, I found a focused team of men and women, engrossed in their daily task of taking the pulse of the planet's most celebrated science instrument: the Hubble space telescope. On the wall in front of them a live 3D rendering of Hubble is projected onto the wall - its orientation and position in orbit 550 kilometers above the Earth presented in real time for everyone in the room to see.

Today Hubble was being harnessed to hunt for distant icy dwarf planets, which Nasa's New Horizons mission might be able to aim for later this year, after its historic flyby of Pluto. Such objects, found in the remote Kuiper Belt, over 4 billion miles from Earth, are typically only half as big as Long Island, NY, and so dark in colour that only Hubble's exquisite mirror has a chance of detecting them.