The Hubble Space Telescope was placed in Earth orbit in April 1990 by astronauts aboard space shuttle Discovery. The telescope, high above the Earth's atmosphere, is designed to receive new observational instrumentation at regular intervals. It was first serviced by astronauts in 1993 as part of a series of planned missions to keep it operating at peak performance. In February 1997, another space shuttle crew placed two new scientific instruments into the Hubble Space Telescope. One, the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), gives the telescope its first infrared observing capability. (Infrared light is emitted at longer wavelengths than human eyes can see.) The NICMOS operates in a wavelength range from 0.8 to 2.5 micrometers.