The Hubble space telescope: 'It's a terrific comeback story' | S...

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The Hubble space telescope: 'It's a terrific

comeback story'
Its 25 years since a shuttle first put the giant space telescope into orbit, but the
project initially seemed doomed to fail. How did Nasas team turn things around,
going on to capture over a million stunning images of deep space?
Ian Sample
Thursday 23 April 2015 07.00BST

The moment had come. Scientists led into the room and set up a screen for the
gathered crowd to watch. On it was to appear the rst ever image from Hubble, Nasas
powerful, sparkling space telescope. That, at least, was the plan. Plenty of the
astronomers wanted this event called, in the business, rst light to be held away
from the media gaze. But the press had been invited and arrived in numbers.
Together they waited. And then it arrived: the rst picture of the heavens from the
most impressive space telescope ever built, one that promised a revolution in our
understanding of the universe.
It was May 1990 and the $1.5bn Hubble had been in orbit for a month. In the room at
Nasas Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, everyone stared at the image.
Some eyebrows went up, says David Leckrone, a senior scientist who worked on
Hubble from 1976 until his retirement in 2009. It was supposed to be a picture of a
binary star, a pair of stars. But it was just sort of a fuzzy blur. Someone piped up: Its
OK, isnt it? Thats how its supposed to look? Those in the know drew breath. That
was not how it was supposed to look.
This Friday, it will be 25 years since the space shuttle Discovery lifted the 11-tonne
telescope into space. The size of a bus, Hubble began circling Earth as Tim
Berners-Lee wrote the rst page of the World Wide Web, and the England football
team were preparing for the World Cup in Italy. After a near- disastrous start, Hubble
came to dene our view of the cosmos.
Hubble was named after Edwin Hubble, the US astronomer who discovered in the
1920s that the universe is expanding. Much of the science that the telescope did built
on his work. But its origins can be traced back to the German scientist Hermann
Oberth who enthused about blasting telescopes into space. It was Lyman Spitzer, a
Princeton astrophysicist, who made the proposal convincing. High above the
distorting blanket of Earths atmosphere, a space telescope could perform science far
beyond the reach of ground telescopes, he argued. His ideas appeared in a 1969
report. Lyman was an extraordinary intellect. He won the backing of fellow scientists,

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and ultimately the US Congress.

Leckrone joined the US space agency the year that Pitzers report came out, and
moved to the edgling Hubble project seven years later. The telescope was designed
to t inside the payload bay of Nasas new eet of space shuttles. Astronauts would
drop the telescope into orbit, then y back on occasional service missions, using the
shuttles robotic arm to grab hold of the telescope and retrieve it.
Nasa hoped to launch Hubble in 1983, but the schedule slipped. The team was about
ready in 1986 when Nasa suered one of the greatest blows in its history. On 28
January that year, the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean,
killing its crew of seven. The disaster grounded the shuttle eet for the best part of
three years. Without the shuttle, Hubble could not y. The engineers made use of the
delay. When Hubble nally reached the launchpad, seven years late, condence was
high.
Steven Hawley, a former astronaut and astronomy professor at Kansas University,
operated the shuttles robotic arm that put Hubble in orbit. When the crew was about
to start the procedure, he thought of all of the people who had devoted much of their
careers to the dream of a large telescope in space. Everyone was dependent on us
executing that last step properly, says Hawley. The deployment went well. Hubble
oated free and the shuttle backed away. Onboard, astronauts captured some
breathtaking footage: the telescope apparently suspended as the Earth rolled
beneath.
Nasa engineers spent several weeks checking out Hubbles systems before taking their
rst picture. The image was a huge disappointment, but Leckrone stayed optimistic.
They could adjust Hubble in countless ways from Earth. A few weeks work and they
would have it working properly, he thought. Then, some weeks went by and nothing
we did made the image much better. Suddenly the mood became very morose, he
says.
The lowest point came one afternoon at Goddard. The various technical teams had
gathered for their regular status meeting. One by one, they stood up and gave verbal
updates: the computer people, the thermal team, the power group. Then it was time
for the optics team. They were still trying to get good images, but so far had got
nowhere. Then another voice broke in from the back of the room. It was Chris
Burrows, an optics specialist. There was an edge of anger in his voice, says
Leckrone. He said: Youve got half a wave of spherical aberration and there is
nothing you can do about it. The room fell silent.
Hubbles 2.4m primary mirror was the product of exquisite workmanship, but the
curvature of the mirror was not quite right around the edges. The fault meant that
images from the mirror would always be blurred because light rays bouncing o the
surface were not properly focused. None of the adjustments that could be made from
Earth could correct the problem.
The Hubble project was managed by Nasas Marshall Space Flight Centre in
Huntsville, Alabama. Some Marshall scientists had heard Burrows speak that

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afternoon. After the meeting, they gathered in a small oce to take stock. As
Leckrone walked in he heard Jean Olivier, Hubbles chief engineer, in downbeat
mood. Break out the hemlock, boys, Olivier said.
The situation was bleak, but not as hopeless as Olivier had feared. An optics specialist
called John Trauger at Nasas Jet Propulsion Lab in California had shown Hubbles
rst blurry image to Marjorie and Aden Meinel, a married couple who ranked among
the worlds best telescope designers. They happened to be on sabbatical at JPL and
knocked on Traugers door when they heard Hubbles rst images had arrived. It took
Aden a matter of minutes to diagnose spherical aberration.
Some weeks later, Trauger was at a meeting of the Optical Society when he bumped
into Aden Meinel in the buet queue. They got chatting. Almost in passing, Meinel
delivered a bombshell. He knew how to x the problem.
Trauger was building a copy of Hubbles Wide Field and Planetary Camera, as a
backup. Inside the camera were a series of coin-sized mirrors that reected light from
Hubbles primary mirror into the cameras detector. Meinel worked out that curving
each of those small mirrors in precisely the right way would cancel out the distortion
of the primary mirror.
The space shuttle ew its rst service mission to Hubble in 1993. The crew replaced
the telescopes main camera with Traugers modied version, and tted a second
device to correct Hubbles other scientic instruments. Back on Earth, the team
pointed the telescope at a patch of space strewn with stars and waited for pictures.
When the rst image came down, it was extraordinarily beautiful, says Leckrone.
From that point on, every place we pointed Hubble in the sky, there was something
new and remarkable. Its a terric comeback story.
Astronauts repaired the orbiting observatory on ve separate missions. Stabilising
gyros broke, solar panels and a power unit were replaced, and new instruments
added. With every mission, we tried to extend Hubbles lifetime and increase its
scientic productivity, says Mike Weiss, former programme director. The last
servicing mission was in 2009, but without the shuttle, no more are planned. Nasas
calculation is that Hubbles instruments will pack up in a year or two. At some point,
it will be brought down. Most of it will burn up in the atmosphere, but parts will rain
down into the Pacic.
Hubble has taken more than a million pictures. It has revealed regions of space where
newborn stars are surrounded by at discs of dust, the building material for planets of
other solar systems. Its images reveal thousands of galaxies. The faintest light we see
left those galaxies when the universe was a mere 500m years into its 13.8bn-year
existence.
Though Hubble is nearing the end of its life, its pictures and raw data will keep
scientists busy. Hubble has provided the last couple of generations with
awe-inspiring images and tonnes of scientic data, and its going to continue
providing that for decades to come, says Weiss. It has far exceeded our
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expectations. Its been the thrill of a lifetime.

Hubbles big brother

Hubble should not fall from the sky until its successor is in orbit. Nasas James Webb
Space Telescope (JWST) is earmarked for launch in 2018, seven years later than
originally planned. The telescope will blast o aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the
European spaceport near Kourou in French Guiana. Its nal destination lies about a
million miles from Earth, in the opposite direction to the sun.
Named after Nasas chief administrator during the Apollo programme, the JWST has a
primary mirror more than ve times larger than Hubbles. The mirror is made up from
18 hexagonal panels which fold up for launch. Once deployed in orbit, the huge
mirror should allow the JWST to see much fainter objects than Hubble.
A giant sunshield the size of a tennis court separates the JWST into two sections. The
warm, sun-facing side carries solar panels to provide power for the telescopes
instruments. The side facing away from the sun is kept cool, and operates at a
temperature of -220C.
Unlike Hubble, the JWST is an infra-red observatory. That gives the telescope the
ability to look further back in time than Hubble. Because the expansion of the
universe is accelerating, ancient galaxies are hurtling away from us at enormous
speed. As they recede, the light they emit is stretched to longer wavelengths, making
them appear more red, or redshifted. By making observations in the infra-red, the
JWST will search for the most far-ung objects: the rst stars and galaxies that
formed after the big bang.
Planet-hunting telescopes have spotted about 2,000 candidate worlds beyond our
solar system. The JWST will watch some of these planets as they cross the faces of
their stars. Light coming from the planets, or through their atmospheres, can reveal
changes in seasons on the ground, weather patterns and potentially even signs of
vegetation.

Topics
Hubble space telescope
Space
Nasa
The space shuttle

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