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hubble is all about

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imagery it's all about taking clear

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sharp beautiful pictures of the sky and

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doing fantastic

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science with with those images

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the story of the hubble space telescope

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launch is best uh

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the way i like to describe it is uh

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climbing to the top of mount everest

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and then suddenly within a couple of

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months of sinking to the bottom of the

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we were having trouble focusing the

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telescope and uh

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we noticed that wide field camera

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pictures that were coming down were

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fuzzy fuzzy blobs instead of nice

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sharp points and over the course of

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early june we started to get worried

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maybe maybe there's something wrong with

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the

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mirror itself you can't believe how down

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every astronomer

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on the hubble team was that day because

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we're about to announce to the world

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we messed up we don't have the telescope

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we thought

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the conclusion we've come to from that

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is that there's a significant

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spherical aberration appears to be

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present in the optics and the simplest

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way of understanding it is that when you

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have a

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mirror that's focusing the light all

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comes together the single point

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is the objective of the exercise you

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want the light to come together and

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focus at a single point

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when you have spherical aberration it

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says that there's some disfigurement of

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that mirror that causes the light

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instead of focusing at a single point to

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be spread across a region

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in space and suddenly in the press was

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born the term hubble trouble

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i remember giving a talk to some young

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kids they were kindergarten kids

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really young kids about the wonders you

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know hubble and

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i said the word hubble telescope

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it was like i was jay leno everybody

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laughed

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it was a very sad very difficult time

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and some people left the program and

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john gave me this one ray of hope it was

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that one little ray of hope

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that i glommed onto we played with it we

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played with the model

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and we realized that if the error were

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in the primary mirror

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we could make our correction with a

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little mirror about the size of a nickel

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inside our camera so we purposely made

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the mirror in our

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instrument and therefore our whole

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camera out of focus

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with a minus sign it was as profoundly

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out of focus

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as the hubble telescope was exactly

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and that was not easy we were finishing

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up the final optical alignment and the

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nasa administrator dan golden

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visited jpl we went to the clean room

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and he said

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what's going on here larry simmons the

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project manager says well we're here to

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fix the hubble telescope and his

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response was no

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you're here to save the agency that was

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a

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pick 2 online

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we'd done everything that we thought we

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had to do but there's no substitute for

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the first image came and it looked

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really good i mean it looked just the

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way

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we did like nine press conferences in a

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row with primarily with pick

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pictures every single one made front

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it took this camera being put in the

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hubble in 1993

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to really start the career of hubble to

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turn hubble from a national disgrace

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almost

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to the great american comeback story and

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here it is still our workhorse camera

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going on 15 years

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it's going to be a tough moment when it

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comes out of the hubble because i

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remember

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exactly the moment it was in place in

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the hubble but i

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really look forward to be able to walk

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up to it and touch it someday in the