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Hubble: the telescope that needed glasses

The most famous telescope in history launched with a mirror that was wrong by a fiftieth of a hair.

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The real story

Hubble was launched on 24 April 1990 from the shuttle Discovery. Its 2.4-metre mirror had been polished to the wrong shape, because a testing instrument at the factory had a lens out of place by about 1.3 millimetres. The edge was off by roughly 2 micrometres, which was enough to smear every star into a fuzzy halo. Late-night comedians had a field day.

In December 1993 the crew of Endeavour made five spacewalks to install a box of corrective mirrors and a new camera with the fix built in. Two years later, astronomers aimed Hubble at a speck of sky near the Big Dipper that looked empty and exposed it for ten days, from 18 to 28 December 1995. The Hubble Deep Field showed about 3,000 galaxies, some seen as they were billions of years ago.

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The facts we checked

  • The Hubble Space Telescope launched in April 1990; its main mirror had been ground slightly wrong — by about 1/50 of a human hair
  • In December 1993 astronauts installed corrective optics — in effect, glasses
  • In 1995 it stared at a tiny dark patch of sky for days and found about 3,000 galaxies (the Hubble Deep Field)

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We checked every number and date on screen before the video was made.

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