Galileo's Telescope Back from Space

Area:	Institute
Start:	18 December 2009
Description:	On December 18 the replica of Galileo's telescope, that was launched into the space last May aboard the shuttle Atlantis, was brought back to Florence. Captain Scott Altman and mission specialist Michael Massimino officially returned it during a public ceremony, held in the Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio, that presented the STS-125 mission through striking films. The Atlantis crew of seven took off on May 11, 2009 from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral to repair and refurbish the Hubble space telescope. Once in space, the astronauts celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of Galileo's celestial discoveries by pointing a replica of the revolutionary telescope, provided by the Museum of the History of Science, where the original instrument is kept, up towards the stars.
Link:	www.imss.fi.it/news/eshuttle2.html

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