Who built the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror?
Shortly after the Hubble Space Telescope's launch in 1990, operators discovered that the observatory's primary mirror had an aberration that affected the clarity of the telescope's early images. Hubble's primary mirror was built by what was then called Perkin-Elmer Corporation, in Danbury, Connecticut.
What is the size of the Hubble telescope mirror?
The Hubble Mirror The heart of the HST is its 94-inch-diameter Cassegrain mirror with a 24-inch center hole. Construction and assembly of the space mirror was a painstaking process spanning almost a decade. Corning Glass Works fabricated the 13-inch-thick blank mirror made of ultra-low expansion glass.
How did the Hubble Space Telescope work?
This device consisted of two small mirrors with a lens hung above the Hubble mirror. A laser beam was then shown on the main mirror through the lens of the corrector, which created a particular light pattern.
How was Hubble's mirror made to be so precise?
To emphasize this precision, if Hubble's mirror were scaled up to the diameter of the earth, any leftover bumps on the glass would be no more than 6 inches high. In order to make certain that the mirror was precisely ground, the optical engineers built a testing device known as a reflective null corrector.
See more
What did the company that made the Hubble's mirror not tell NASA?
NASA says the refractive instrument was 'much cruder', and that – unlike the reflective null corrector – it was neither 'certified' to measure spherical aberration, nor intended for precise measurement of the final surface figure. It now appears that the cruder instrument gave the correct result.
Which mirror is used in Hubble telescope?
Hubble's mirrors are curved hyperbolically, meaning that they have a deeper curve than a standard, parabolic Cassegrain mirror. This variation, called a Ritchey-Chrétien design, provides sharper images over a wider field of view.
How did they fix the Hubble telescope mirror?
While the detective work was going on, NASA engineers scrambled to come up with possible fixes, everything from sending a spacewalking astronaut into Hubble's optical tube to replace the telescope's secondary mirror, to installing a circular shade around the opening of the tube, reducing the aperture and improving the ...
Who made the James Webb telescope mirrors?
Fowler is one of many people at Materion, an advanced material suppliers headquartered in Mayfield Heights, who helped make the mirrors that focus infrared light in the James Webb Telescope. Materion made the slabs that became the mirrors in the mid 2000s at its facility in Elmore, about 20 miles southeast of Toledo.
What is a telescope mirror called?
A primary mirror (or primary) is the principal light-gathering surface (the objective) of a reflecting telescope.
What are space telescope mirrors made of?
They are actually constructed from beryllium, a strong but lightweight metal. Each mirror piece weighs about 46 pounds (20 kilograms) on Earth.
Did Lockheed Martin build the Hubble telescope?
Hubble — which was built at the Lockheed Martin Space site in Sunnyvale, California — was conceived to tackle scientific goals that could be accomplished only by an observatory in space.
What was wrong with Hubble lens?
In late June, Hubble failed a focusing test. Its mirrors had been carefully ground to focus incoming light from celestial objects, but the images were smeared by a halo-like fog. The cause was spherical aberration in its primary mirror.
Who created the test used to check the accuracy of a telescope mirror?
In the early 1970s, Karl Bath invented an interferometer to test telescope mirrors with quantitative results and it was recognized as the most informative method of the time.
Why is James Webb mirror gold?
The James Webb Space Telescope has been plated with gold due to elements properties like a high reflection of infrared light and extreme unreactivity. The James Webb Space Telescope is at the end stage of its launch preparations and is just days away from unraveling new secrets about our universe.
Who was the prime contractor on the James Webb telescope?
Northrop GrummanAs the prime contractor to develop the James Webb Space Telescope, Northrop Grumman designed and built the deployable sunshield, provided the spacecraft and integrated the total system.
How much did the JWST mirror cost?
Launch date: Dec. 25, 2021. Cost (at time of launch): $10 billion. Orbit: JWST will orbit the sun, around the second Lagrange point (L2), nearly 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. Primary mirror size: 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) across.
Is Hubble an optical telescope?
Hubble, the observatory, is the first major optical telescope to be placed in space, the ultimate mountaintop. Above the distortion of the atmosphere, far far above rain clouds and light pollution, Hubble has an unobstructed view of the universe.
Is Hubble a reflecting telescope?
Hubble is a Cassegrain reflector telescope. Light from celestial objects travels down a tube, is collected by a bowl-like, inwardly curved primary mirror and reflected toward a smaller, dome-shaped, outwardly curved secondary mirror.
How does the Hubble telescope see?
Hubble is not the kind of telescope that you look through with your eye. Hubble uses a digital camera. It takes pictures like a cell phone. Then Hubble uses radio waves to send the pictures through the air back to Earth.
How many mirrors and cameras are on Hubble?
Hubble's six cameras and sensors see visible, infrared and ultraviolet light. At the heart of Hubble is its 8-foot-diameter (2.4 meters) primary mirror.
Where is the Hubble telescope on display?
This object is on display in the Explore the Universe exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. View Exhibition. This is the backup primary mirror for the Hubble Space Telescope manufactured by the Eastman Kodak Company.
Where was the Perkin Elmer flight mirror stored?
It was left un-aluminized mirror and delivered to the Perkin-Elmer Corporation in Danbury Connecticut, the prime contractor for the flight mirror, and was stored there until the end of 2000, at which time NASA determined that its value as a display object was greater than its potential value as a telescope mirror.
Where was the Hubble telescope's mirror ground?
This photograph shows the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror being ground at the Perkin-Elmer Corporation's large optics fabrication facility in 1979, more than a decade before its very small but very significant flaw was discovered.
What was the impact of the primary mirror on the Hubble telescope?
Shortly after the Hubble Space Telescope's launch in 1990, operators discovered that the observatory's primary mirror had an aberration that affected the clarity of the telescope's early images.
Why did Hubble return images that were less clear than expected?
Once Hubble began returning images that were less clear than expected, NASA undertook an investigation to diagnose the problem. Ultimately the problem was traced to miscalibrated equipment during the mirror's manufacture. The result was a mirror with an aberration one-50th the thickness of a human hair, in the grinding of the mirror.
When was the corrective optics space telescope installed?
The corrective optics and new instruments were built and installed on Hubble by spacewalking astronauts during a shuttle mission in 1993. The Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) instrument, about the size of a telephone booth, placed into Hubble five pairs of corrective mirrors that countered the effects of the flaw. ...
When did Hubble image reconstruction take place?
Between 1990 and 1993, some Hubble images were processed using computer image reconstruction techniques that somewhat mitigated the effects of the flawed mirror. This comparison image of the core of the galaxy M100 shows the dramatic improvement in Hubble Space Telescope's view of the universe after the first Hubble Servicing Mission in December ...
What is the left image of the spiral galaxy M100?
The left image of spiral galaxy M100 is a view from Hubble's original WFPC-1 camera in wide-field mode on Nov. 27, 1993, just a few days prior to the STS-61 servicing mission. The effects of optical aberration in Hubble's 8-foot primary mirror blur starlight, smear out fine detail, and limit the telescope's ability to see faint structures.
Who built the Hubble telescope?
The Hubble telescope was built by the United States space agency NASA with contributions from the European Space Agency. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) selects Hubble's targets and processes the resulting data, while the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) controls the spacecraft.
When was the Hubble Space Telescope launched?
The Hubble Space Telescope (often referred to as HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation.
How many Hubble missions were there?
Instruments and limited life items were designed as orbital replacement units. Five servicing missions (SM 1, 2, 3A, 3B, and 4) were flown by NASA space shuttles, the first in December 1993 and the last in May 2009.
How many instruments does Hubble have?
Hubble accommodates five science instruments at a given time, plus the Fine Guidance Sensors, which are mainly used for aiming the telescope but are occasionally used for scientific astrometry measurements. Early instruments were replaced with more advanced ones during the Shuttle servicing missions. COSTAR was a corrective optics device rather than a science instrument, but occupied one of the five instrument bays.
How much did the Hubble telescope cost?
At the time of its launch in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope cost $4.7 billion (equivalent to $9,310,200,000 in 2020). Hubble features a 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in) mirror, and its four main instruments observe in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
What is the only telescope designed to be maintained in space by astronauts?
Hubble is the only telescope designed to be maintained in space by astronauts. Five Space Shuttle missions have repaired, upgraded, and replaced systems on the telescope, including all five of the main instruments.
What is the HST telescope?
Optically, the HST is a Cassegrain reflector of Ritchey– Chrétien design, as are most large professional telescopes. This design, with two hyperbolic mirrors, is known for good imaging performance over a wide field of view, with the disadvantage that the mirrors have shapes that are hard to fabricate and test. The mirror and optical systems of the telescope determine the final performance, and they were designed to exacting specifications. Optical telescopes typically have mirrors polished to an accuracy of about a tenth of the wavelength of visible light, but the Space Telescope was to be used for observations from the visible through the ultraviolet (shorter wavelengths) and was specified to be diffraction limited to take full advantage of the space environment. Therefore, its mirror needed to be polished to an accuracy of 10 nanometers, or about 1/65 of the wavelength of red light. On the long wavelength end, the OTA was not designed with optimum IR performance in mind—for example, the mirrors are kept at stable (and warm, about 15 °C) temperatures by heaters. This limits Hubble's performance as an infrared telescope.
Overview
Flawed mirror
Within weeks of the launch of the telescope, the returned images indicated a serious problem with the optical system. Although the first images appeared to be sharper than those of ground-based telescopes, Hubble failed to achieve a final sharp focus and the best image quality obtained was drastically lower than expected. Images of point sources spread out over a radius of more than one a…
Conception, design and aim
In 1923, Hermann Oberth—considered a father of modern rocketry, along with Robert H. Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky—published Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ("The Rocket into Planetary Space"), which mentioned how a telescope could be propelled into Earth orbit by a rocket.
The history of the Hubble Space Telescope can be traced back as far as 1946, …
List of Hubble instruments
Hubble accommodates five science instruments at a given time, plus the Fine Guidance Sensors, which are mainly used for aiming the telescope but are occasionally used for scientific astrometry measurements. Early instruments were replaced with more advanced ones during the Shuttle servicing missions. COSTAR was a corrective optics device rather than a science instrument, but occupied one of the four axial instrument bays.
Servicing missions and new instruments
Hubble was designed to accommodate regular servicing and equipment upgrades while in orbit. Instruments and limited life items were designed as orbital replacement units. Five servicing missions (SM 1, 2, 3A, 3B, and 4) were flown by NASA Space Shuttles, the first in December 1993 and the last in May 2009. Servicing missions were delicate operations that began with maneuveri…
Major projects
Since the start of the program, a number of research projects have been carried out, some of them almost solely with Hubble, others coordinated facilities such as Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESO's Very Large Telescope. Although the Hubble observatory is nearing the end of its life, there are still major projects scheduled for it. One example is the current (2022) ULLYSES project (Ultraviol…
Public use
Anyone can apply for time on the telescope; there are no restrictions on nationality or academic affiliation, but funding for analysis is available only to U.S. institutions. Competition for time on the telescope is intense, with about one-fifth of the proposals submitted in each cycle earning time on the schedule.
Calls for proposals are issued roughly annually, with time allocated for a cycle …
Scientific results
In the early 1980s, NASA and STScI convened four panels to discuss key projects. These were projects that were both scientifically important and would require significant telescope time, which would be explicitly dedicated to each project. This guaranteed that these particular projects would be completed early, in case the telescope failed sooner than expected. The panels identified …