Source: New Scientist
Twenty years after its launch, the Hubble Space Telescope’s spectacular images are a familiar sight. Yet it is incredible that the observatory has survived this long, given the near-death experiences it has faced along the way, says David Shiga
LIKE the space telescope he championed, astronomer Lyman Spitzer faced some perilous moments in his career. Most notably, on a July day in 1945, he happened to be in the Empire State building when a B-25 Mitchell bomber lost its way in fog and crashed into the skyscraper 14 floors above him. Seeing debris falling past the window, his curiosity got the better of him, as Robert Zimmerman recounts in his Hubble history, The Universe in a Mirror. Spitzer tried to poke his head out the window to see what was going on, but others quickly convinced him it was too dangerous.
Spitzer was not the first astronomer to dream of sending a telescope above the distorting effects of the atmosphere, but it was his tireless advocacy, in part, that led NASA to launch the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990.
Initially jubilant, astronomers were soon horrified to discover that Hubble’s 2.4-metre main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. Although it was only off by 2.2 micrometres, this badly blurred the telescope’s vision and made the scientists who had promised the world new images and science in exchange for $1.5 billion of public money the butt of jokes. The fiasco, inevitably dubbed “Hubble Trouble” by the press, wasn’t helped when even the limited science the crippled Hubble could do was threatened as its gyroscopes, needed to control the orientation of the telescope, started to fail one by one.
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