Hubble

Over 15 years in Earth orbit, «Hubble» received 700 thousand 22 thousand images of celestial objects - stars, nebulae, galaxies, planets. The flow of data that it generates every day in the observations is about 15 GB. Their total volume accumulated for all time the telescope is more than 20 terabytes. More than 3900 astronomers were able to use it for observations, published about 4000 articles in scientific journals. It was found that the average citation index of astronomical articles, based on data from the telescope two times higher than that of articles based on other data. Every year the list of 200 most cited articles are less than 10% cover work performed on the basis of the Hubble. The zero index options are about 30% of works on astronomy in general, and only 2% of works carried out by using the space telescope.

Nevertheless, the price to be paid for achieving «Hubble», is very high: a special study on the impact on the development of astronomy telescopes of various types, found that although the work performed through the orbital telescope have a cumulative citation index of 15 times greater than that of the ground-reflector with a 4-meter mirror, the cost of maintaining the space telescope above 100 times or more.