Space Telescope Science Institute in the context of "Johns Hopkins University"

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most versatile, renowned as a vital research tool and as a public relations boon for astronomy. The Hubble Space Telescope is named after astronomer Edwin Hubble and is one of NASA's Great Observatories. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) selects Hubble's targets and processes the resulting data, while the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) controls the spacecraft.

Hubble features a 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in) mirror, and its five main instruments observe in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Hubble's orbit outside the distortion of Earth's atmosphere allows it to capture extremely high-resolution images with substantially lower background light than ground-based telescopes. It has recorded some of the most detailed visible light images, allowing a deep view into space. Many Hubble observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, such as determining the rate of expansion of the universe.

Adam Guy Riess (born December 16, 1969) is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Riess has been at the center of a growing scientific debate about the so-called “Hubble tension” — a discrepancy between measurements of the universe’s expansion rate using nearby supernovae, and measurements inferred from the cosmic microwave background radiation using the Standard Model of cosmology. Riess’s data has prompted questions and further testing to determine if the Standard Model still adequately describes the universe.

The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) is an astronomical data archive. The archive brings together data from the visible, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelength regimes. The NASA funded project is located at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland and is one of the largest astronomical databases in the world.

The archive was named after Barbara Ann Mikulski, a long time champion of the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, in 2012. It is a component of NASA's distributed Space Science Data Services. The archive contains the data from a number of instruments like Pan-Starrs, Kepler, and TESS, as well as data for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).