How a telescope has transformed astronomy, and all of us

This essay is an entry to our "Dear Spaceship" series, in which we ask writers, scientists and astronomy enthusiasts to say why they feel personally connected to robotic space explorers.

A few years ago, a series of segments appeared on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon that the nerds of astronomy liked. Here's the premise: a cool Yankees-dressed man called "Milky J" would come out of the audience and marvel at the Hubble Space Telescope. One after the other, Milky J was showing Hubble's breathtaking images, then he was shouting his slogan: "Gotchu Hubble!"

In my case, Milky J's slogan turned out to be quite accurate. Wherever I am in life – a nerd of astronomy, a telescope data analyst, and now a science journalist who keeps abreast of your latest news – you got me.

Your path to glory was difficult. You started as a huge government boondoggle, a sideline in the same kind of late-night talk shows that you celebrated later. You had to start in 1983, but you were delayed. You had to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but your budget was exceeded …way more than. And when you were finally launched in 1990, your vision was blurred, thanks to a mirror malformed by the contractors who built you.

Things began to change for you in the spring of 1993, when astronomers spotted a broken comet en route to hitting Jupiter. They wanted you to watch closely, and that winter, astronauts visited you and put on corrective glasses. A few days before the comet crash, you still had software problems (fears before the game, maybe?). But just in time, you have captured the impact of comets on Jupiter's atmosphere – echoes of the old collision that has condemned the dinosaurs.

Shortly after, I met you for the first time. When I was in elementary school, I saw your famous photo "Pillars of Creation" and I remember it was upsetting my world. You showed us technicolor stalagmites stretching in the light. It was something vast, something that could not be real.

I did not understand then that raising such fear was only part of your much larger mission. For example, you have measured the rate at which distant galaxies retreat as the universe grows, a rate that, like you, shares its name with astronomer Edwin Hubble.

For decades, cosmologists have lived and died arguing over the exact value of that number. So you have been built to fix the problem. But you just could not get along pretty well: watching the stars explode in the distance, you showed that space expansion really accelerates with a mysterious mixer in the cosmic cocktail we now call energy black. As you re-measure the rate of expansion with greater precision, your conclusions disagree with those of the world's largest observatories of cosmology. If this gap persists, it may mean that you have spotted another missing ingredient in the universe – you know, as we do.

You also peered for days in the darkest corner of space. Whenever you have them, you have come across countless galaxies, dating back to the dawn of time. Your first attempt at this journey in visual time was called the Hubble Deep Field. Now, after the "Ultra Deep Field", "Extreme Deep Field" and "Frontier Fields" fields, you must run out of adjectives to describe the depth of your sight.

And when you do not look in the early days of the universe, you sometimes observe the atmospheres of the worlds outside our solar system. No one even knew exoplanets when they built you. You can now watch a planet cross its star and spot the light that filters the atmosphere of this planet. These subtle signals are as close to sniffing alien air as we will soon have.

All the while, you continued to post images and I watched them with admiration. I remember forcing friends and college friends to go through your photo galleries and tell them that your dream landscapes were as sublime as Edmund Burke or Emmanuel Kant would have been. Do you remember those pictures? Galaxies tear like hurricanes? The innumerable star clusters? Nebulae swollen by dead suns, carved in balls of colored glass?

After my university studies, I worked at your land base, the Baltimore Space Telescope Science Institute. I do not think you remember me. I was one of the small people, a very small part of a team that was analyzing one of your cameras to detect signs of wear and tear. Now, I spend much less time browsing your raw data. But I still like to see your pictures. you remain an attentive eye above the Earth's atmosphere, a regular presence that allows for many discoveries.

Last year, I had 30 years, a period of retrospection. Know that when you enter the third decade of your life, many of us on Earth feel such a kinship – a world-class telescope the size of a school bus, a portal to the surreal and the sublime greatest experiences scientists of human history.

What I say is: we gotchu.

Joshua Sokol is a freelance writer based in Boston. A former researcher and instrument analyst at Hubble, he now covers the great outdoors, the depths of time, and other subjects of natural history. Connect with him on Twitter.