The issue was that their in-house instrument had been built incorrectly and therefore did not identify the spherical aberration actually present on the mirror. However, the manufacturer dismissed these error identifications from conventional measurement tools because they believed their in-house built device was more accurate. (Credit: NASA)Ĭompounding the issue and NASA’s growing public confidence issue was the investigation’s findings that the defect had actually been identified via quality control testing by the mirror’s primary manufacturer and could have been fixed prior to the telescope’s launch. The magnitude of Hubble’s vision problem (left) and the corrected optics in Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (right) after the STS-61 rescue mission. This was possible because the issue with the mirror was so well understood and characterized that astronomers were able to compensate for the defect by using sophisticated image processing on the ground. The telescope and NASA became the punchline of jokes despite Hubble scientists being able to make numerous productive observations of astronomical targets. The perimeter of its primary mirror was too flat by 87 microinches or just 2.2 micrometers – an astoundingly small error but one with devastating consequences to Hubble’s primary scientific mission. Every image was distorted and fuzzy.Īn analysis and inquiry found that Hubble’s primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. The Hubble Space Telescope was billed as a revolutionary observatory taken clear of Earth’s distorting atmosphere to obtain sharp, crystal clear images across multiple spectrum to unlock the secrets of the universe and peer deeply back in time.īut in the first weeks after launch, NASA – in the midst of the on-going hydrogen leak issues – was forced to admit that their multi-billion dollar telescope and flagship scientific venture had a near fatal flaw. In 1990 alone, the space agency, still recovering from the Challenger disaster of 1986, suffered multiple setbacks, not the least of these being persistent Liquid Hydrogen leaks across the Shuttle fleet – an issue that delayed multiple flights and forced a complete reordering of the launch manifest.īut on top of that, the agency’s premier space observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, was found to have a critical flaw in its primary optics mirror after its launch aboard Shuttle Discovery in April 1990. To say that NASA went through the wringer in the first few years of the 1990s would be an understatement. Saving Hubble – a mission to restore public confidence in NASA: The mission was also largely symbolic of what NASA can accomplish and served as a restoration of the public’s confidence in the space agency following a series of missteps in the first three years of the new decade. Twenty-five years ago today, arguably the most important Space Shuttle mission of the 1990s landed back at the Kennedy Space Center, concluding a daring, complex, and high-stakes rescue mission to save the Hubble Space Telescope.
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