Few scientists believe that the space shuttle has helped their profession. Mostly, it has been used to convey astronauts to a space station that has produced little worthwhile research and to launch satellites that might have been put into orbit more cheaply by old-fashioned, throw-away rockets. But it has done one thing to assist astronomers. It has allowed what is probably their most famous instrument to be repaired and upgraded. That instrument is the Hubble space telescope, which took the picture of the Carina nebula shown above, and has snapped more than half a million other images over the years.
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