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Scientists can see better with Hubble than with any telescope on the ground because Hubble travels above the atmosphere. On Earth, the atmosphere makes pictures taken by visible-light telescopes look smeary – clouds, precipitation, and atmospheric temperature changes get in the way. But in the near vacuum of space, Hubble can take very clear, crisp pictures -- no clouds or atmosphere exist between it and the star or galaxy it's observing. Every day Hubble archives between three and five gigabytes of data and sends 10 to 15 gigabytes to astronomers around the world.
Once the telescope gathers the data, its computers turn the information into long strings of numbers that are beamed to Earth as radio signals. This information streams through a series of satellite relays to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Then it travels by telephone line to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. It is there that the numbers are converted back into pictures and useful data for study. The Hubble Space Telescope is named for astronomer Edwin P