Remember when the Hubble Space Telescope was more punchline than science powerhouse? Today is the thirtieth anniversary since NASA launched the first servicing mission for the stricken Hubble observatory, a record that lands just as the the space telescope faces a fresh round of fixes. On December 4, 1993, at 0926 UTC, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was secured in the payload bay of Space Shuttle Endeavour, …
is that all those congress critters and senators complaining about "billions wasted" on space exploration have no trouble signing off on excessive tax cuts for both rich people and corporations while supporting more money to be blown on the military
Sums way above however much gets spent on Hubble, James webb, the shuttle/ISS etc etc etc
Unless the NASA spending is in their district of course....
>Unless the NASA spending is in their district of course....
HST built in California, by NASA in Alabama, project managed by NASA in Maryland and data analysed by NASA in Baltimore
Launched in Florida, mission controlled from Houston on a Shuttle whose explody-rockets were built in Utah and then taken apart to fit on railroad cars (hope that doesn't lead to any problems)
Because it was built in laboratory conditions the mirror was very precisely ground but to the wrong profile. Fortunately the profile was known which facilitated the production, under similar conditions, of corrective optics. So what happened in space was "just" field service fitting a factory-made component.
They did actually test the optics on the ground and didn't believe it when the test failed - NASA could only believe that their test was what was at fault, rather than their $$$ mirror.
At least, once diagnosed, they knew precisely how wrongly the mirror had been ground, so could design the corrective lens to make things better.
"I've always struggled to get my head around the fact that HST was built on the ground under laboratory conditions, and all the relative luxury of a ground-based exercise, but still had a fault....yet it was fixed so quickly in the challenging environment of space."
I suppose the one thing they couldn't do under laboratory conditions was to focus on something many light years away without the earth's atmosphere getting in the way. That said, for something that expensive, you'd think everyone would be very careful to ensure that everything was 100% correct.
FWIW "so quickly" required an almost seven hour spacewalk. It also required a more than two year design and build process; again without the luxury of a test environment that was identical to where it was going.
I bet there were an awful lot of fingers and toes crossed back in 1993
You don't need to focus on something light years away in the lab to test it.
A simple knife-edge test you can do with a razor blade would have shown the fault. But it had been carefully made to an extremely precise figure (just wrongly) so there was no need to waste time doing a rough and ready high-school lab test.
Ironically it then sat in storage for 3 years after Challenger disassembled itself, when there would have been lots of time to test it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
