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Showing posts from September, 2018

Hubble - And The Art Of Repentance

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope was launched from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on April 24, 1990. Expensive Cargo onboard the space shuttle Discovery. Hubble marked the most significant advance in astronomy since Galileo's telescope 400 years ago. Our view of the universe has never been the same since then. But, shortly after the Hubble Space Telescope was switched on, the pictures were coming back fuzzy. 2.5 billion US Dollars had been spent developing and launching Hubble - a public relations disaster! Following much checking and searching, it was found that a part of the mirror had been overpolished. This caused the telescope's primary mirror to have an aberration, affecting clarity of the telescope's early images. A committee was tasked with fixing and defuzzing Hubble.  Around 30 proposed solutions were submitted to for study: “Move the focal point back”,  “put in another mirror” etc.. Interestingly, the approach they accepted was to exactly replicate the ci