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In December 1993, the first new images from Hubble reached Earth, and they were breathtaking. Two new cameras, including the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC-2), which later took many of Hubble's most famous photos, were installed during the fix. 2, 1993, the space shuttle Endeavour ferried a crew of seven to fix Hubble during five days of spacewalks. It appears on the wall of an establishment called Loser's Bar, along with pictures of the Hindenburg, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Ford Edsel and other famous disasters.īut all was not lost, for Hubble was designed to be serviced by astronauts. For instance, the 1991 film " Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear" features a photo of Hubble. Hubble became a laughingstock, the butt of jokes that spread through popular culture. The flaw was minute, at just 1/50th the thickness of a sheet of paper, but that was big enough to cause major imaging problems. It turned out that Hubble's 7.9-foot-wide (2.4 meters) main mirror had a defect - a spherical aberration caused by a manufacturing error. For example, the telescope's first images came back so blurry that they were close to useless scientifically. Hubble experienced equipment issues right off the bat. Initial instruments on Hubble included the Wide Field Planetary Camera, the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS), the Faint Object Camera (FOC), the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS) and the High Speed Photometer. (Image credit: NASA) Blurry initial images - and a much-needed fix The Hubble Space Telescope is deployed from NASA's space shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990. Getting Hubble developed and launched cost $1.5 billion, but there would be ongoing costs as well - both expected and unexpected. Hubble finally launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery on Apand a day later was deployed into low Earth orbit, about 340 miles (545 kilometers) above our planet. It was more than 2.5 years before shuttle flights resumed and NASA could begin planning Hubble's launch again. 28, 1986, killing all seven astronauts on board. Hubble's planned liftoff was delayed again after the space shuttle Challenger exploded a minute after takeoff on Jan. In the meantime, the Large Space Telescope was renamed Hubble in honor of Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer who, among other things, determined that the universe extended beyond the borders of the Milky Way. NASA planned to launch the telescope in 1983, but various production delays pushed the launch date back to 1986.
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Congress eventually granted funding for NASA's portion of the Large Space Telescope in 1977.ĭevelopment began almost immediately. NASA then upped its lobbying efforts and got buy-in from European Space Agency, which shared the costs. The expensive project was a tough sell, and funding was initially denied by the House Appropriations Subcommittee in 1975. Here, astronauts practice servicing the telescope in the weightless environment of the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. The Hubble Space Telescope went through many years of development. In 1971, George Low, the agency's acting administrator at the time, greenlit the Large Space Telescope Science Steering Group, and NASA soon began lobbying Congress for funding for the endeavor. NASA was already considering a space telescope of some type, but the agency was undecided about how big to make it and where to start. The National Academy of Sciences took the pitch to NASA - the only agency capable of making the Large Space Telescope a reality. National Academy of Sciences to organize a committee of scientists to evaluate the potential of a "Large Space Telescope." With Spitzer at the helm, the committee published a document in 1969 that outlined the scientific uses of a Large Space Telescope and advocated for its construction, according to a Hubble history written by Gabriel Olkoski for NASA.
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It took a couple more decades before the idea garnered enough support for the U.S. In 1946, soon after World War II, astronomer Lyman Spitzer proposed launching a space telescope, which could overcome the limitations of ground-based observatories.