Nature Video

As the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s launch approaches, Nature Video looks back at some of the craft's greatest discoveries through the eyes of those who were involved with them. Hubble’s images have made careers, paved the way for a Nobel prize and inspired a generation of astronomers. In this series, Nature Video asked five scientists to tell us about their favourite Hubble moment. Check back at this page to see the videos in the week leading up to Hubble’s 25th anniversary on 24 April.

Episode 5: Robert Kirshner, astronomer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was part of the supernova team that used Hubble to discover the accelerating expansion of the universe, for which the team leaders received the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. Kirshner also used Hubble to probe the ashes of supernovae, most famously one that appeared in the southern sky in 1987.

Episode 4: Mike Massimino, former NASA astronaut. Massimino has had a closer relationship with Hubble than almost anyone else on Earth — or off it. As an active astronaut, he helped to service the telescope in orbit on two space-shuttle missions, in 2002 and 2009.

Episode 3: Antonella Nota, at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, and the European Space Agency, uprooted her life and moved from Italy to Maryland to join the Hubble project, just weeks before the 1986 Challenger explosion delayed the launch for three years. But her dedication to the project paid off.

Episode 2: Jason Kalirai, an astronomer at the STScI in Baltimore, Maryland. Kalirai helped to run one of the biggest observational programmes ever on Hubble, which peered into the Andromeda galaxy, next to our own.

Episode 1: Mario Livio, also an astronomer at the STScI. Livio has worked with Hubble for almost its entire lifetime, and calls the telescope "a discovery machine".