Free Interactive e‑Books from NASA Reveal History, Discoveries of the Hubble & Webb Telescopes

Ear­li­er this month NASA announced that the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope found evi­dence of a plan­et form­ing 7.5 bil­lion miles from its star. This aston­ish­ing dis­cov­ery chal­lenges all of our cur­rent the­o­ries about how plan­ets devel­op.

A few days lat­er, Hub­ble cap­tured images of two galax­ies merg­ing.

Hub­ble has been in orbit since 1990, col­lect­ing images with one of the largest and most ver­sa­tile tele­scopes designed for deep space. No sin­gle tool has done as much to advance astro­nom­i­cal pub­lic rela­tions in recent years.

Hubble’s devel­op­ment, launch and dis­cov­er­ies are the sub­ject of a new, free inter­ac­tive e‑book (best viewed on the iPad) that brings to life Hubble’s dis­tin­guished ser­vice as our eye on the uni­verse.

For almost as long as Hub­ble has been in space, NASA has been work­ing on the next gen­er­a­tion space tele­scope. The James Webb Space Tele­scope will fea­ture a mir­ror three times the size of Hubble’s. Once launched, the tele­scope will trav­el far beyond our Moon. NASA’s free e‑book about the Webb Tele­scope reveals the prepa­ra­tion going on to get the new tool ready for take-off.

Its large mir­ror and dis­tant view­ing posi­tion are expect­ed to give Webb’s images high­er res­o­lu­tion and sen­si­tiv­i­ty, allow­ing sci­en­tists to study the birth and evo­lu­tion of galax­ies as well as the for­ma­tion of stars and plan­ets.

The e‑books are writ­ten at a high school lev­el and can be viewed on an iPad using a free iBooks app. If you don’t have an iPad, no need to wor­ry. A non-inter­ac­tive ver­sion of the Hub­ble eBooks is also avail­able, as is one about the Webb Tele­scope.

You will find these books in our col­lec­tions, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices and 200 Free Kids Edu­ca­tion­al Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Web­sites & More

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Live: Watch NASA’s Cov­er­age of Aster­oid As It Buzzes By Earth

NASA Sends Image of the Mona Lisa to the Moon and Back

Leonard Nimoy Nar­rates Short Film About NASA’s Dawn: A Voy­age to the Ori­gins of the Solar Sys­tem

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her web­site and fol­low her on Twit­ter @mskaterix.