Hubble Space Telescope above the Earth The Hubble Space Telescope HST was put into orbit from the Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS on April The HST was designed to see seven times further into space than had been possible before without the distortion caused by the Earths atmosphere Problems with its giant mirror meant that it did not initially work as well as expected Corrective optics were installed in greatly improving the telescopes performance enabling it to view the Universe in unprecedented detail