When NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1990, the agency already intended to send astronauts up to change out the observatory's scientific instruments from time to time, keeping it at the forefront of science.
But the telescope's builder's also made it flexible enough to accommodate a variety of unforeseen repairs and upgrades — a feature that came in quite handy when it became apparent that Hubble launched with a serious error in its primary mirror that rendered its initial images blurry.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
