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The First Picture From Hubble Was Heart-Breaking!
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The Hubble Space Telescope is a marvel of engineering that changed the course of astronomy. The 4.7-billion-dollar telescope was launched in April 1990. After it was launched more than three decades ago, there was great excitement about its first picture. But when Hubble took its first shot, it was a huge embarrassment. There seemed to be some significant flaw, which made all the images fuzzy.
But what was the flaw exactly, and how did NASA fix the space telescope?
The problem was with the null corrector, a scientific instrument used in testing large mirrors. This instrument generates some kind of "contour map," and it is called a null corrector because if the mirrors are perfect, the numerical result of the test will be null. Unfortunately, some NASA tests concluded that this null corrector was a few millimeters askew, and that small mistake led to errors in the tests.
The error that the flawed mirror introduced is known as spherical aberration. In a perfect telescope mirror, light from a distant object gets focused on one point. But if the mirror is flawed, the telescope is rendered fundamentally unfocussed. All the five instruments aboard the telescope relied on the light from this mirror. As a result, none of them could work perfectly. The solution, at heart, was straightforward. First, they thought about replacing the mirror, as Kodak had a backup mirror on the ground. But that would have been very expensive and hard to do. So, they came up with this: if the mirror is wrong-shaped somewhere, why don't we make a package of corrective optics with the exact same error but with an inverse effect. That would cancel the error in the first place.
There were five servicing missions for Hubble, the first one in 1993 and the last one in 2009. The one that fixed this problem was the first servicing mission, the one from 1993, STS-61. The mission comprised seven well-prepared astronauts and lasted 11 days. It established many records for NASA, including the fact that it was one of the most complex missions ever.
After the mission, the team of Hubble took pictures of stars and galaxies, and everything seemed to work perfectly. Looking at the pictures, they knew that the problem was solved, and everything that Hubble was supposed to do was now going to happen. After more than three decades, Hubble continues to be astronomers' best friend in space. The telescope has really changed the way we look at the cosmos.
#hubble #space #nasa #telescope
Created By: Rishabh Nakra
Written By: Simran Buttar and Bogdan Teodorescu
Narrated By: Jeffrey Smith
But what was the flaw exactly, and how did NASA fix the space telescope?
The problem was with the null corrector, a scientific instrument used in testing large mirrors. This instrument generates some kind of "contour map," and it is called a null corrector because if the mirrors are perfect, the numerical result of the test will be null. Unfortunately, some NASA tests concluded that this null corrector was a few millimeters askew, and that small mistake led to errors in the tests.
The error that the flawed mirror introduced is known as spherical aberration. In a perfect telescope mirror, light from a distant object gets focused on one point. But if the mirror is flawed, the telescope is rendered fundamentally unfocussed. All the five instruments aboard the telescope relied on the light from this mirror. As a result, none of them could work perfectly. The solution, at heart, was straightforward. First, they thought about replacing the mirror, as Kodak had a backup mirror on the ground. But that would have been very expensive and hard to do. So, they came up with this: if the mirror is wrong-shaped somewhere, why don't we make a package of corrective optics with the exact same error but with an inverse effect. That would cancel the error in the first place.
There were five servicing missions for Hubble, the first one in 1993 and the last one in 2009. The one that fixed this problem was the first servicing mission, the one from 1993, STS-61. The mission comprised seven well-prepared astronauts and lasted 11 days. It established many records for NASA, including the fact that it was one of the most complex missions ever.
After the mission, the team of Hubble took pictures of stars and galaxies, and everything seemed to work perfectly. Looking at the pictures, they knew that the problem was solved, and everything that Hubble was supposed to do was now going to happen. After more than three decades, Hubble continues to be astronomers' best friend in space. The telescope has really changed the way we look at the cosmos.
#hubble #space #nasa #telescope
Created By: Rishabh Nakra
Written By: Simran Buttar and Bogdan Teodorescu
Narrated By: Jeffrey Smith
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