The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit in 1990, after a few initial hiccups it has sent back many incredible images, advancing our understanding of the universe.

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in 1473 in the town of Torun in Poland, the youngest child of a well to do family of German origin. By the age of 10 both his parents had died, leaving him under the care of his wealthy, influential and educated Uncle.

Unfortunately there isn’t an easy answer to the question “How big is the solar system?” in fact there is no scientific definition. It all depends on what factors are used to specify what the solar system is, let’s look at some of the possible answers.

Orbiting the sun are the planets of the solar system, each one different from the others with its own characteristics and individual qualities. From the tiny planet mercury to the giant of the solar system, Jupiter, from the hellish desert environment of Venus to the ocean covered world of Earth.

In the summer of 1977 the twin Voyager spacecraft would embark on a remarkable ‘Grand Tour' of the Solar System. They would visit the outer planets and capture images of worlds that had never been seen in such detail before, but the journey was only possible thanks to a scenario that occurs every 175 years.

Galileo Galilei was born in 1564 in the town of Pisa in central Italy. He received a religious education as a child and by his early adulthood was a devout catholic. At the age of 17 his ambition was to become a priest but was instead encouraged by his father to enroll at the University of Pisa in order to study medicine.

There are over 170 known moons in our solar system, many of which are just as or even more remarkable than the planets. When we first began to explore the solar system we expected to find rather bland, colorless, inactive moons like our own, we couldn’t have been more wrong.

Cassini-Huygens was a joint NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) mission named after the French-Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini and the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens.

Isaac Newton was born in Lincolnshire, England in 1643. By the time of his birth Newton’s father had already died, and by the age of three his mother re-married and left her young son in the care of his grandparents

In October of 1989 the Galileo spacecraft was launched from Earth orbit by the Space Shuttle Atlantis, its target was the gas giant Jupiter with a planned arrival date of December 1995.

William Herschel was born in Hannover in Germany in 1738. As his father was a musician in the Hannover Guard his early life was devoted to music. William followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a musician in the Guard.

The word atom is derived from the ancient Greek word ‘atomos’ meaning indivisible or uncuttable. Ancient philosophers contemplated that if you kept cutting an object, breaking it down into its smallest constituents, you would eventually reach a piece that would be so small it would be impossible to cut it any further