HST Separation from Shuttle Discovery

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) floats gracefully above the blue Earth in December 1999 at the conclusion of HST servicing mission 3A. Hubble's release moments earlier by the Space Shuttle Discovery’s robotic arm marked the fourth time that a space shuttle had set the great observatory into space. Those occasions were the telescope's initial release in 1990 and three subsequent servicing missions including this one, shuttle mission STS-103.