Launched 22 years ago this week, the Hubble Space Telescope has done some pretty amazing things, from providing unprecedented views of distant galaxies to helping us to better understand the origins of the universe to laying the groundwork for the International Space Station to
fighting breast cancer.

For even the most non-space-savvy, the first two make sense. Known originally after its April 24, 1990 launch on the space shuttle Discovery's STS-31 mission as a failure, Hubble got a new lease on life when a shuttle crew conducted repairs to the telescope during the first Hubble servicing mission in 1993. And what a life it has been -- its troubled beginnings almost forgotten, Hubble has become one of the most common household names of modern spaceflight. When you see an image of the cosmos, there's a good chance it was created with the Hubble Space Telescope.

That first servicing mission, and those that followed it, also played a role in the success of the International Space Station. Unparalleled in its complexity, the massive orbiting laboratory, launched over the course of numerous flights over more than a decade, required more spacewalks than had been conducted in all of history to assemble. The success of the Hubble servicing spacewalks helped provide confidence both to NASA and its international partners that the daunting challenge
of assembling the space station would, in fact, be possible.

And as for helping to fight breast cancer? It turns out that studying distant galaxies and searching for cancer have a good bit in common. Both the Hubble Space Telescope and modern mammography rely on
technology that converts light into digital files. When developing Hubble required advancing this technology beyond its state at the time, mammograms benefited from the increased resolution. But not only the hardware has benefited -- before Hubble's first servicing mission, software was developed to compensate for its flawed optics; and that software was also adapted for use in mammograms, setting a precedent for future contributions. Today, because of Hubble, mammograms can be cheaper, more accurate, and available to experts in remote locations.

Hubble is just another example of one of the big reasons the work done "out there" in space is so important -- it makes life much better "down here."