“After Hubble’s deployment in 1990. Astronomers quickly realized there was a problem.”
The conclusion we've come to from that is that there is a significant
spherical aberration appears to be present in the optics.
...and that we should be able to fix it in our insurance program.
Thousands and thousands of people worked on Hubble.
And by the way, if you asked all of those thousands and thousands of people
before the launch in April of 1990.
“What’s your ten biggest concerns about what could go wrong on Hubble?”
I absolutely guarantee you that not one of them would have said
spherical aberration or a bad mirror.
“Astronauts would install hardware to compensate for Hubble’s flawed mirror”
“The world was watching.”
“The Great American Comeback / Hubble’s Servicing Mission 1”
Spherical aberration is a problem
in the surface structure of the mirror.
The mirror is supposed to be ground to a perfect parabola.
Where all parallel
light coming down comes to one focus.
Spherical aberration is when one part of the mirror
is slightly higher or lower
than the other and light instead of coming to one
focus from, say, the edge of the mirror
will come over here
and then from the center of the mirror will come to focus up here.
So you get, what that does is blur the focus.
You can almost think of it if you've got bad myopia,
which you can say our telescope has now
and you put your glasses on, you can correct totally and get 2020 vision.
I'll never forget the day of the fabled
press conference at Goddard,
when we had announced to the world that the Hubble was broken
and we didn't know if we could fix it.
We didn't frankly think we could fix it except just before the press conference.
Space Telescope Science Working Group,
a bunch of about 20 astronomers involved with Hubble
were meeting at Goddard, coincidentally, that day.
And I ran into John Trauger.
He was a scientist on the Wide Field Camera
One team, the one that was taking all the fuzzy pictures.
And he called me over to the hallway and said, “Ed, I want to tell you something.”
And I said, “What?” “We can fix this.”
I said, “Come on, John.
What do you mean?”
He said, “now that we know the prescription of the mirror,
the shape is perfect,
but it's got the wrong shape, just like your nearsighted eye.
Now that we know the exact prescription to, you know, five or ten decimal points,
there are four little mirrors inside our new camera that we're building.
Our backup camera called the the clone the Wiffpick 2 clone
there are four little called relay mirrors.
If we reground those
with the correction that we know we need in it like glasses for your eyes.
We could solve the problem internally right away.
1993 We go up to fix it.”
I said, “are you sure, John?
Because I'm going to tell the press this.”
He said, “I'm positive.”
So during my press conference, I gave all the nasty things, Oh,
we're not going to take any pictures,
we’re not going to be able to do this. However.
We feel that
we can characterize the problem, the spherical aberration problem,
well enough that we can take advantage of an insurance policy
that we haven't talked much about and it hasn't been in the press much.
And that is we started a long time ago to plan a maintenance program
that is every three years we plan to go up with the Space Shuttle,
change our instruments, change out things that broke.
Before launch
if you had said what would be success, I would say 50% and the Wiffpick.
But the Wiffpick had to be,
COSTAR by itself I don’t think would have made the difference,
but Wiffpick images. People aren’t going to believe a spectra,
Think about it, would people have believed a nice beautiful spectrum
fixed the Hubble Space Telescope,
or a picture of the Eagle Nebula? I leave it to the audience.
So that’s what I said, Wiffpick and about 50% of the other things
and we’d be happy, because we’ve never done this before.
This is the first time NASA ever tried five EVAs, more than 6 hours each.
And to do all these different things Wiffpick,
you know, COSTAR, gyros, solar panels.
I mean we are doing everything except putting in a new kitchen sink.
So we all fly to Houston.
The first EVA started.
Of course all these things happen at night,
but astronomers are used to that.
Every night it became like a dream sequence,
because every night they’d start, they'd get this done, that done Wiffpick went in,
next night they got COSTAR in, next night they got Gyros in.
And by the end of the fifth night, we're looking at each other like,
Are we dreaming or did this happen?
Did we just do five successful EVAs and fix everything?
So we came back from Houston like on top of the world, but it was like,
you know, it's like you had major eye surgery
and the operation was a success, but you still the bandages on
and we had to take the bandages off some time.
We're all looking at this monitor
when the picture was taken and it was just a real rich starfield.
And what we're hoping not to see is a bunch of fuzzy stars
with all kinds of weird rays coming out of them
like they used to be in spherical aberration.
So the image started coming up.
And this is an old Cathode-ray tube
So yeah,
I know this is technology that some of the young people in the audience
don’t even know what I'm talking about,
but it took a while for the image to build up.
And we first saw
a little bright star in the center, and then some fainter stars came up.
More and more stars came up.
You could hear a pin drop.
You could have heard an atom drop on the floor.
It was so quiet.
And slowly, more and more stars came up and they were sharp.
And there were lots of them.
Lots of them.
Because when you're out of focus, you don't see very faint things.
When you're in focus, you really see deep.
And then the picture was there and it was perfect, absolutely perfect.
And there's still a moment of silence.
And then everybody just went crazy.
Hey, hey, hey!
Scientist Celebration Noises
And I can't describe it, everybody just hugging each other,
crying tears, you know,
somebody came in with champagne, you know, It was.
It was just a moment I'll never forget as long as I live.
Hubble was fixed.
Total success.
You couldn't have
you couldn't have had had a bigger success in that first servicing mission
when Hubble was launched.
I always thought that,
you know, it would die
and I’d have another ten or 20 years in my career.
And here I retired ten years and it’s still going.
It made me the butt of jokes, it made me
a collector of arrows, slings and arrows from my neighbors.
and the press thought I was a joke.
And seeing where Hubble is now
making those early promises look like nothing.
I mean, piece of cake.
I mean, it’s iconic.
It's the greatest American scientific achievement ever.
It's the great American comeback story.
We should be able to fix it in our insurance program.
I think we're all committed.
Nobody's walking away.
I think we're all committed to work on it and do it right.
“Servicing Mission 1 allowed Hubble to continue forward with its mission.”
“With over 1.5 million observations, Hubble is one of the most productive astronomical instruments ever built.”
“Thirty years later, Hubble continues making discoveries that change our understanding of the universe.”
“Follow us on social media @NASAHubble”