On 24 April 2005, the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) will be 15 years ago. No other telescope in space has had a similar impact on astronomy at large, and the ESA TV Service will release between now and 24 April, a series of three special programmes on the achievemts and perspective of HST.
These special programmes bring together a large amount of-often not yet released- 3-D graphics of HST results and the phenomena it ha sbeen observing.
Today's transmission focuses on achievements in cosmology, notably the determination of the age of the Univserse and the measurement of the Hubble constant, and new insight into the birth rate of stars in the early universe.
The Programme is made of an A-roll (split audio, English) of five minutes plus a B-roll with clean international sound.

VNR 1: Hubble birth and evolution of the Universe
A-roll script
17 March 2005
10:00:40
Who would not wish to travel back in time to see how it all
started with our Universe?
Images Big Bang
animation/travel ling through universe
10:01:00
Since the Hubble Space telescope was launched 15 years ago,
one of its most important uses was and will be to serve as a
time machine allowing astronomers to look back to the
beginnings of our time.
Images Shuttle launch
Hubble orbiting in space
10:01:16
Light may travel through space at a speed faster than anybody
can imagine, but it is still a finite speed. Light from very
distant stars is therefore very old and because it is in space,
Hubble can much better detect faint and distant light sources.
These show how things were when the light began its journey,
billions of years ago.
Images light speed animation
10:01:40
One of the key questions astronomers have wanted to answer
for decades is how old and big our universe is. And Hubble
was built to give these fundamen