“Next week, NASA plans to launch the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, turning it into the world’s most powerful optical telescope. Once up there, it will look back through 14 billion years of the history of the Universe,” we wrote in our 7 April 1990 issue.
Our reporters Susan Watts and Helen Gavaghan observed that “in even the clearest night, from the highest mountain and with the largest of telescopes, the Earth’s atmosphere restricts our view of the Universe”. Orbiting 600 kilometres above Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope would “see so far and so clearly that astronomers say only that they expect the unexpected from the data that Hubble will collect”.
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The pair reminded readers that Riccardo Giacconi at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, had told the annual meeting of the Astronomical League in 1986 that “ultimately the sociological impact of this new knowledge will be as great as the revolutions started by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton”. That was the year that Hubble would have launched, had the Challenger space shuttle not exploded.
Yet following its launch from the Discovery space shuttle on 24 April 1990, there were early indications of problems with Hubble. The telescope was sending back blurred images. We reported suspicions that vibrations were causing this in our 19 May 1990 edition.
The first shots were still encouraging: they were already clearer than images recorded by ground-based telescopes. By July, though, the sad truth had dawned . A faulty measuring device had made the primary mirror 2 micrometres too flat, less than the width of a human hair. This meant the multibillion-dollar telescope couldn’t focus light as well as was expected.
Soon, there were plans for a repair. Five pairs of mirrors, each around the size of a postage stamp, were installed three years after Hubble launched to correct the primary mirror . “NASA finally seems to have got something right,” we reported on 22 January 1994, as “the telescope has at last begun to produce sharp images of distant galaxies”.
Hubble went on to produce a plethora of observations: there are more than 1500 mentions of it in 91av‘s archive , including its iconic images, such as the Pillars of Creation Mike Holderness.
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