On this day in space! May 11, 2009: Final Hubble servicing mission launches

On May 11, 2009, the space shuttle Atlantis launched on the fifth and final servicing mission for the Hubble Space Telescope.

An STS-125 crewmember onboard the space shuttle Atlantis snapped a still photo of the Hubble Space Telescope as the two spacecraft approached each other in Earth orbit prior to the capture of the giant observatory on May 13, 2009. — NASA's wingless M2-F2 lifting body crashed on Rogers Dry Lakebed at the Dryden Flight Research Center in California on May 10, 1967. (Image credit: NASA.)

— Photos: NASA's Last Mission to the Hubble Space Telescope

— Photos: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Missions

— Hubble Space Telescope: Pictures, Facts & History

This would help researchers study the formation of galaxies and other large-scale structures in the universe.

The second instrument was the Wide Field Camera 3, which replaced the old Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 that was installed during the first servicing mission in 1993. This new camera could observe the universe in visible, near-infrared and near-ultraviolet light with a higher resolution and larger field of view than any of Hubble's older instruments.

The crew completed their tasks in five spacewalks over the course of the 13-day mission.

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Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.