A Telescope Rejuvenated

In fact, NASA had lost a big battle, but they weren’t yet ready to concede the war. With Hubble working at part strength, the agency immediately began planning to diagnose and correct the problem with the optics. Although a backup mirror was available, the cost of bringing the telescope down to Earth and re-launching it would have been exorbitant. It was just as well that the telescope had been built to be visited by the Space Shuttle and serviced by astronauts. The instruments sitting behind the telescope fit snugly into bays like dresser drawers and they could be pulled out and replaced with others of the same size.

It also helped that the mirror flaw was profound but relatively simple, and the challenge was reduced to designing components with exactly the same mistake but in the opposite sense, essentially giving the telescope prescription eyeglasses. The system designed to correct the optics was the brainchild of electrical engineer James Crocker, and it was called COSTAR, or Corrective Optical Space Telescope Axial Replacement.10 COSTAR was a delicate and com­plicated apparatus with more than five thousand parts that had to be positioned in the optical path to within a hair’s breadth. Install­ing COSTAR raised the difficulty level of an already challenging first servicing mission that was planned for late 1993. Seven astro­nauts spent thousands of hours training for the mission, learning to use nearly a hundred tools that had never been used in space before. They did a record five back-to-back space walks, each one grueling and dangerous, during which they replaced two instru­ments, installed new solar arrays, and replaced four gyros. This last fix was needed because of the disconcerting tendency of Hub­ble’s gyros to fail at a high rate, in a way never seen in lab testing. Without working gyros, the telescope could not point at or lock on a target. Before leaving, the crew boosted Hubble’s altitude, since three years of drag in Earth’s tenuous upper atmosphere had started to degrade the orbit.

The first servicing mission was a stunning success. It restored the imaging capability to the design spec and added new capabili­ties with a more modern camera. It also played significantly into the vigorous debate in the astronomy and space science commu­nity over the role of humans in space. NASA had always placed a strong bet that the public would be engaged by the idea of space as a place for us to work and eventually live. But after the success of Apollo, public interest and enthusiasm waned. (It even waned during the program; a final three planned Moon landings were scrapped.) Also, most scientists thought that it was cheaper and less dangerous to create automated or robotic missions than to ser­vice them with astronauts. NASA’s amazingly successful planetary missions from the 1970s to the 1990s were seen as evidence of the primacy of robotic spacecraft. Hubble was of course designed to be serviced by astronauts, but the often-unanticipated problems they were able to solve in orbit, coupled with the positive public response (and high TV ratings during the space walks, at least the early ones), persuaded many that the human presence was essen­tial and inspirational.

More servicing missions followed. Each one rejuvenated the facility and kept it near the cutting edge of astronomy research. The second mission in 1997 installed a sensitive new spectrograph and Hubble’s first instrument designed to work in the infrared. Astronauts also upgraded the archaic onboard computers. The third mission in 1999 was moved forward to deal with the vex­ing problem of failing gyros. Before the mission flew, the telescope lost a fourth gyro, essentially leaving it dead in the water.11 All six gyros were replaced and the computer was upgraded to one with a blistering speed of 25 MHz and capacious two megabytes of RAM (that’s fifty times slower and thousands of times less storage than the average smart phone). The fourth mission in 2002 replaced the last of the original instruments and also removed COSTAR since it was no longer needed—each subsequent instrument has had its optics designed to compensate for the aberration of the primary mirror. The infrared instrument was revived, having run out of coolant two years early. New and better solar arrays were installed, along with a new power system, which caused some anx­iety since to install it the telescope had to be completely powered down for the first time since launch. Except for its mirror, Hubble is reminiscent of the ship of Theseus, a story from antiquity where every plank and piece of wood of a ship is replaced as it plies the seas.

The fifth and last servicing mission almost didn’t happen. Once again, the mission was affected by a Shuttle disaster, in this case the catastrophic loss of Columbia and crew in February 2003. NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe decided that human repairs of the telescope were too risky and future Shuttle flights could only go to the safe harbor of the International Space Station. He also studied engineering reports and concluded that a robotic servicing mission was so difficult that it would most likely fail. At that point, Hubble was destined to die a natural death as gyros and data links failed.

When in January 2004 it was announced that the Hubble Space Telescope would be scrapped, the public’s response was overwhelm­ingly in support of refurbishing the instrument in orbit. David De – vorkin and Robert Smith report that a “‘Save the Hubble’ move­ment sprang into life.”12 Robert Zimmerman similarly comments: “The public response. . . was, to put it mildly, loud. Very soon, NASA was getting four hundred emails a day in protest, and over the next few weeks editorials and op-eds in dozens of newspapers across the United States came out against the decision.”13 Zim­merman details the history, development, and deployment of the telescope as well as its more significant findings. He suggests that Hubble, more than any other telescope or major scientific instru­ment, has allowed humankind to explore what lies at the furthest depths of space and that this is one reason for the widespread pub­lic sense of ownership of what some newspapers have called the “people’s telescope.”14 Not since Edwin Hubble did his pioneering work on cosmology with the 100-inch reflector at Mount Wilson Observatory has public interest in a particular instrument been so intense or pervasive.15

O’Keefe and other NASA officials were taken aback by the pub­lic response. They’d expected astronomers to lobby hard for an­other servicing mission, and they weren’t surprised that astronauts weighed in, saying they’d signed up knowing the risks and they wanted to service the telescope. But it turned out that a large num­ber of people felt attached to Hubble through its spectacular pic­tures and newsworthy discoveries. They felt clear affection for the facility, and since the taxpayer had indeed paid for it, the agency took notice and O’Keefe first reevaluated and then reversed his decision.16 The fifth servicing mission went off without a hitch in May 2009, leaving the telescope in better shape overall and with certain capabilities a hundred times more effective than its original configuration.17 Two new instruments were installed, two others were fixed, and many other repairs were carried out since it was agreed by everyone that this was the last time the telescope would be serviced (figure 11.1).

Hubble’s continual rejuvenation is a major part of its scientific impact. The instruments built for the telescope are state-of-the-art, and competition for time on the telescope has consistently been so intense that only one in eight proposals gets approved. All this comes with a hefty price tag. Estimating the cost of Hubble is dif­ficult because of how much to assign to the Shuttle launches and astronaut activities, but a twenty-two-year price tag of $6 billion is probably not far from the mark. For reference, the budget was $400 million when construction started and the cost at launch was $2.5 billion. Compared to slightly larger 4-meter telescopes on the ground, Hubble generates fifteen times as many scientific citations (one crude measure of impact on a field) but costs one hundred times as much to operate and maintain.18 Regardless of its cost, the facility sets a very high bar on any subsequent space telescope. As Malcolm Longair, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge and former chairman of the Space Telescope Sci­ence Institute Council, has observed: “The Hubble Space Telescope has undoubtedly had a greater public impact than any other space astronomy mission ever.” He also notes that this small telescope’s “images are not only beautiful, but are full of spectacular new sci­ence,” much of which was unimagined by the astronomers who conceived and launched the instrument.19