The Many Resurrections of the Hubble Space Telescope

Laughing stock: In the 1991 comedy Naked Gun 2 1/2, the Hubble Space Telescope (top right, on the wall) was depicted as a disaster on par with the Edsel, Michael Dukakis, and the Titanic. If you are old enough to remember news stories from 1990 (or if you are a devoted student of astronomy), you'll recall that the Hubble Space Telescope was not always regarded as the technological triumph that NASA is loudly celebrating today, on its 25th anniversary. The orbiting observatory debuted as a king-size disaster: the telescope that couldn't see straight, built with a mirror that was ground perfectly...but perfectly incorrect. The story of how the error was discovered and ultimately fixed has been told many times, most recently in a beautiful retrospective by my colleague Ian Sample at The Guardian. But today it is hard to appreciate the magnitude of Hubble's turnaround--the depth of the scientific despair right after launch, and the many resurrections that transformed Hubble into the most famous and productive observatory in history. Since Hubble may not live to celebrate a 30th anniversary, there is no time like the present to tell the tale. The Unbelievable Truth Astronomers knew there was something wrong with Hubble from the moment they saw the first data downloads. It was obvious even in the so-called first light snapshot that NASA unveiled on May 20, 1990. That image, showing a section of star cluster NGC 3532, should have presented a set of crisp dots of light. Instead the stars are notably blurred and distorted. Mission scientists were in denial at first, assuming (or hoping) that they were dealing with a simple problem of fine-tuning Hubble's optics. The reality was initially too shocking to grasp.