On This Day in Space! May 11, 2009: Final Hubble Servicing Mission Launches

May 11, 2009, the space shuttle Atlantis launched on the fifth and final servicing mission for the Hubble Space Telescope.

During mission STS-125, astronauts installed two new instruments on the telescope. One was the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which allowed Hubble to observe faint objects in the cosmos in ultraviolet light. This would help researchers study the formation of galaxies and other large-scale structures in the universe.

Photos: NASA's Last Mission to the Hubble Space Telescope

The second instrument was the Wide Field Camera 3, which replaced the old Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 that was installed during the first servicing mission in 1993. This new camera could observe the universe in visible, near-infrared and near-ultraviolet light with a higher resolution and larger field of view than any of Hubble's older instruments.

The crew completed their tasks in five spacewalks over the course of the 13-day mission.

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