Hubble spots Pluto
On October 4, 1990, the recently launched Hubble Space Telescope set its sights on Pluto, which was still considered a planet at the time. To capture an image of the distant object, astronomers used Hubble’s onboard Faint Object Camera, a product of the European Space Agency. Ground-based telescopes had previously shown highly pixelated views of Pluto, along with its moon Charon, but the Hubble image offered a clearer view. Still, at an average distance of 3.78 billion miles (6 billion kilometers), Pluto’s finer details remained out of sight.
