1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,803
“After Hubble’s deployment in 1990.
Astronomers quickly realized there was a problem.”

2
00:00:03,803 --> 00:00:06,639
The conclusion we've come to from
that is that there is a significant

3
00:00:06,639 --> 00:00:09,943
spherical aberration
appears to be present in the optics.

4
00:00:09,943 --> 00:00:13,680
...and that we should be able to fix it
in our insurance program.

5
00:00:13,680 --> 00:00:16,483
Thousands and thousands of 
people worked on Hubble.

6
00:00:16,483 --> 00:00:19,853
And by the way, if you asked all of those
thousands and thousands of people

7
00:00:19,853 --> 00:00:23,023
before the launch in April of 1990.

8
00:00:23,023 --> 00:00:25,959
“What’s your ten biggest concerns
about what could go wrong on Hubble?”

9
00:00:25,959 --> 00:00:29,496
I absolutely guarantee you
that not one of them would have said

10
00:00:29,496 --> 00:00:31,297
spherical aberration or a bad mirror.

11
00:00:31,297 --> 00:00:39,906
“Astronauts would install hardware to 
compensate for Hubble’s flawed mirror”

12
00:00:39,906 --> 00:00:43,376
“The world was watching.”

13
00:00:43,376 --> 00:00:47,614
“The Great American Comeback / Hubble’s Servicing Mission 1”

14
00:00:47,614 --> 00:00:48,581
Spherical aberration is a problem

15
00:00:48,581 --> 00:00:50,350
in the surface
structure of the mirror.

16
00:00:50,350 --> 00:00:54,320
The mirror is supposed to be ground
to a perfect parabola.

17
00:00:54,320 --> 00:00:55,688
Where all parallel

18
00:00:55,688 --> 00:00:58,925
light coming down
comes to one focus.

19
00:00:58,925 --> 00:01:01,561
Spherical aberration is when 
one part of the mirror

20
00:01:01,561 --> 00:01:02,896
is slightly higher or lower

21
00:01:02,896 --> 00:01:05,365
than the other and light
instead of coming to one

22
00:01:05,365 --> 00:01:07,367
focus from, say,
the edge of the mirror

23
00:01:07,367 --> 00:01:08,768
will come over here

24
00:01:08,768 --> 00:01:11,838
and then from the center of the mirror
will come to focus up here.

25
00:01:11,838 --> 00:01:14,441
So you get, what that does is blur
the focus.

26
00:01:14,441 --> 00:01:17,310
You can almost think of it
if you've got bad myopia,

27
00:01:17,310 --> 00:01:20,013
which you can say our telescope has now

28
00:01:20,013 --> 00:01:23,583
and you put your glasses on, you can 
correct totally and get 2020 vision.

29
00:01:23,583 --> 00:01:25,485
I'll never forget the day
of the fabled

30
00:01:25,485 --> 00:01:26,719
press conference at Goddard,

31
00:01:26,719 --> 00:01:29,155
when we had announced to the world
that the Hubble was broken

32
00:01:29,155 --> 00:01:30,457
and we didn't know if we could fix it.

33
00:01:30,457 --> 00:01:35,562
We didn't frankly think we could fix it
except just before the press conference.

34
00:01:35,562 --> 00:01:37,130
Space Telescope Science Working Group,

35
00:01:37,130 --> 00:01:40,133
a bunch of about 20 astronomers
involved with Hubble

36
00:01:40,133 --> 00:01:43,236
were meeting at Goddard, coincidentally, that day.

37
00:01:43,236 --> 00:01:45,071
And I ran into John Trauger.

38
00:01:45,071 --> 00:01:47,640
He was a scientist on the Wide Field
Camera

39
00:01:47,640 --> 00:01:51,377
One team, the one that was taking
all the fuzzy pictures.

40
00:01:51,377 --> 00:01:55,648
And he called me over to the hallway and
said, “Ed, I want to tell you something.”

41
00:01:55,648 --> 00:01:59,119
And I said, “What?” “We can fix this.”

42
00:01:59,119 --> 00:02:00,220
I said, “Come on, John.

43
00:02:00,220 --> 00:02:01,254
What do you mean?”

44
00:02:01,254 --> 00:02:04,557
He said, “now that we know
the prescription of the mirror,

45
00:02:04,557 --> 00:02:07,026
the shape is perfect,

46
00:02:07,026 --> 00:02:10,730
but it's got the wrong shape,
just like your nearsighted eye.

47
00:02:10,730 --> 00:02:15,335
Now that we know the exact prescription
to, you know, five or ten decimal points,

48
00:02:15,335 --> 00:02:19,005
there are four little mirrors inside our
new camera that we're building.

49
00:02:19,005 --> 00:02:23,243
Our backup camera called the
the clone the Wiffpick 2 clone

50
00:02:23,243 --> 00:02:25,612
there are four little called relay mirrors.

51
00:02:25,612 --> 00:02:28,982
If we reground those

52
00:02:28,982 --> 00:02:33,753
with the correction that we know
we need in it like glasses for your eyes.

53
00:02:33,753 --> 00:02:36,523
We could solve the problem
internally right away.

54
00:02:36,523 --> 00:02:39,159
1993 We go up to fix it.”

55
00:02:39,159 --> 00:02:40,493
I said, “are you sure, John?

56
00:02:40,493 --> 00:02:42,695
Because I'm going to tell the press this.”

57
00:02:42,695 --> 00:02:45,398
He said, “I'm positive.”

58
00:02:45,398 --> 00:02:48,301
So during my press conference,
I gave all the nasty things, Oh,

59
00:02:48,301 --> 00:02:49,769
we're not going to take any pictures,

60
00:02:49,769 --> 00:02:52,438
we’re not going to be able to do this. However.

61
00:02:52,438 --> 00:02:54,107
We feel that

62
00:02:54,107 --> 00:02:57,377
we can characterize the problem,
the spherical aberration problem,

63
00:02:57,377 --> 00:03:01,247
well enough that we can take advantage
of an insurance policy

64
00:03:01,247 --> 00:03:04,651
that we haven't talked much about
and it hasn't been in the press much.

65
00:03:04,651 --> 00:03:08,588
And that is we started a long time ago
to plan a maintenance program

66
00:03:08,588 --> 00:03:11,991
that is every three years
we plan to go up with the Space Shuttle,

67
00:03:11,991 --> 00:03:15,495
change our instruments, change out things that broke.

68
00:03:15,495 --> 00:03:16,863
Before launch

69
00:03:16,863 --> 00:03:21,901
if you had said what would be success,
I would say 50% and the Wiffpick.

70
00:03:21,901 --> 00:03:23,169
But the Wiffpick had to be,

71
00:03:23,169 --> 00:03:25,505
COSTAR by itself I don’t think would have made the difference,

72
00:03:25,505 --> 00:03:29,943
but Wiffpick images. People aren’t going to believe a spectra,

73
00:03:29,943 --> 00:03:32,912
Think about it, would people have believed a nice beautiful spectrum

74
00:03:32,912 --> 00:03:34,280
fixed the Hubble Space Telescope,

75
00:03:34,280 --> 00:03:38,184
or a picture of the Eagle Nebula? I leave it to the audience.

76
00:03:38,184 --> 00:03:41,621
So that’s what I said, Wiffpick and about 50% of the other things

77
00:03:41,621 --> 00:03:43,890
and we’d be happy,  because we’ve never done this before.

78
00:03:43,890 --> 00:03:48,194
This is the first time NASA ever tried
five EVAs, more than 6 hours each.

79
00:03:48,194 --> 00:03:51,764
And to do all these different things Wiffpick,

80
00:03:51,764 --> 00:03:54,234
you know, COSTAR, gyros, solar panels.

81
00:03:54,234 --> 00:03:57,036
I mean we are doing everything
except putting in a new kitchen sink.

82
00:03:57,036 --> 00:03:58,504
So we all fly to Houston.

83
00:03:58,504 --> 00:03:59,806
The first EVA started.

84
00:03:59,806 --> 00:04:01,541
Of course
all these things happen at night,

85
00:04:01,541 --> 00:04:03,376
but astronomers are used to that.

86
00:04:03,376 --> 00:04:05,912
Every night it became like a dream sequence,

87
00:04:05,912 --> 00:04:09,649
because every night they’d start, they'd
get this done, that done Wiffpick went in,

88
00:04:09,649 --> 00:04:12,352
next night they got COSTAR in, next night they got Gyros in.

89
00:04:12,352 --> 00:04:15,388
And by the end of the fifth night,
we're looking at each other like,

90
00:04:15,388 --> 00:04:17,457
Are we dreaming or did this happen?

91
00:04:17,457 --> 00:04:21,461
Did we just do five successful EVAs
and fix everything?

92
00:04:21,461 --> 00:04:25,999
So we came back from Houston
like on top of the world, but it was like,

93
00:04:25,999 --> 00:04:27,934
you know, it's like
you had major eye surgery

94
00:04:27,934 --> 00:04:30,603
and the operation was a success,
but you still the bandages on

95
00:04:30,603 --> 00:04:33,172
and we had to take the bandages off
some time.

96
00:04:33,172 --> 00:04:34,407
We're all looking at this monitor

97
00:04:34,407 --> 00:04:38,711
when the picture was taken and it was just a real rich starfield.

98
00:04:38,711 --> 00:04:41,881
And what we're hoping not to see
is a bunch of fuzzy stars

99
00:04:41,881 --> 00:04:44,684
with all kinds of weird rays
coming out of them

100
00:04:44,684 --> 00:04:46,953
like they used to be
in spherical aberration.

101
00:04:46,953 --> 00:04:48,488
So the image started coming up.

102
00:04:48,488 --> 00:04:50,023
And this is an old Cathode-ray tube

103
00:04:50,023 --> 00:04:51,624
So yeah,

104
00:04:51,624 --> 00:04:54,594
I know this is technology that some of the young people in the audience

105
00:04:54,594 --> 00:04:56,329
don’t even know what I'm talking about,

106
00:04:56,329 --> 00:04:58,531
but it took a while for the image to build up.

107
00:04:58,531 --> 00:04:59,365
And we first saw

108
00:04:59,365 --> 00:05:03,469
a little bright star in the center,
and then some fainter stars came up.

109
00:05:03,469 --> 00:05:07,006
More and more stars came up.

110
00:05:07,006 --> 00:05:08,541
You could hear a pin drop.

111
00:05:08,541 --> 00:05:11,544
You could have heard an atom
drop on the floor.

112
00:05:11,544 --> 00:05:12,945
It was so quiet.

113
00:05:12,945 --> 00:05:17,417
And slowly, more and more stars came up and they were sharp.

114
00:05:17,417 --> 00:05:19,352
And there were lots of them.

115
00:05:19,352 --> 00:05:20,253
Lots of them.

116
00:05:20,253 --> 00:05:22,922
Because when you're out of focus,
you don't see very faint things.

117
00:05:22,922 --> 00:05:25,992
When you're in focus, you really see deep.

118
00:05:25,992 --> 00:05:30,430
And then the picture was there
and it was perfect, absolutely perfect.

119
00:05:30,430 --> 00:05:31,864
And there's still a moment of silence.

120
00:05:31,864 --> 00:05:34,901
And then everybody just went crazy.

121
00:05:34,901 --> 00:05:37,837
Hey, hey, hey!

122
00:05:37,837 --> 00:05:52,251
Scientist Celebration Noises

123
00:05:52,251 --> 00:05:55,521
And I can't describe it,
everybody just hugging each other,

124
00:05:55,521 --> 00:05:57,724
crying tears, you know, 

125
00:05:57,724 --> 00:06:00,159
somebody came in
with champagne, you know, It was.

126
00:06:00,159 --> 00:06:03,463
It was just a moment
I'll never forget as long as I live.

127
00:06:03,463 --> 00:06:05,631
Hubble was fixed.

128
00:06:05,631 --> 00:06:06,799
Total success.

129
00:06:06,799 --> 00:06:07,633
You couldn't have

130
00:06:07,633 --> 00:06:10,703
you couldn't have had had a bigger success in that first servicing mission

131
00:06:10,703 --> 00:06:11,738
when Hubble was launched.

132
00:06:11,738 --> 00:06:13,473
I always thought that,

133
00:06:13,473 --> 00:06:14,774
you know, it would die

134
00:06:14,774 --> 00:06:17,243
and I’d have another ten or 20 years in my career.

135
00:06:17,243 --> 00:06:20,913
And here I retired ten years
and it’s still going.

136
00:06:20,913 --> 00:06:26,152
It made me the butt of jokes, it made me

137
00:06:26,152 --> 00:06:28,821
a collector of arrows, slings and arrows
from my neighbors.

138
00:06:28,821 --> 00:06:31,190
and the press thought I was a joke.

139
00:06:31,190 --> 00:06:33,860
And seeing where Hubble is now

140
00:06:33,860 --> 00:06:36,896
making those early promises
look like nothing.

141
00:06:36,896 --> 00:06:38,698
I mean, piece of cake.

142
00:06:38,698 --> 00:06:41,267
I mean, it’s iconic.

143
00:06:41,267 --> 00:06:44,737
It's the greatest American
scientific achievement ever.

144
00:06:44,737 --> 00:06:52,145
It's the great American comeback story.

145
00:06:52,145 --> 00:06:55,782
We should be able to fix it
in our insurance program.

146
00:06:55,782 --> 00:06:57,617
I think we're all committed.

147
00:06:57,617 --> 00:06:58,651
Nobody's walking away.

148
00:06:58,651 --> 00:07:02,688
I think we're all committed to
work on it and do it right.

149
00:07:02,688 --> 00:07:14,233
“Servicing Mission 1 allowed Hubble 
to continue forward with its mission.”

150
00:07:14,233 --> 00:07:28,915
“With over 1.5 million observations, Hubble is one of 
the most productive astronomical instruments ever built.”

151
00:07:28,915 --> 00:07:40,460
“Thirty years later, Hubble continues making discoveries 
that change our understanding of the universe.”

152
00:07:40,460 --> 00:07:59,679
“Follow us on social media @NASAHubble”