鈥淣ext week, NASA plans to launch the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, turning it into the world鈥檚 most powerful optical telescope. Once up there, it will look back through 14 billion years of the history of the Universe,鈥� we wrote in our 7 April 1990 issue.
Our reporters Susan Watts and Helen Gavaghan observed that 鈥渋n even the clearest night, from the highest mountain and with the largest of telescopes, the Earth鈥檚 atmosphere restricts our view of the Universe鈥�. Orbiting 600 kilometres above Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope would 鈥渟ee so far and so clearly that astronomers say only that they expect the unexpected from the data that Hubble will collect鈥�.
Advertisement
The pair reminded readers that Riccardo Giacconi at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, had told the annual meeting of the Astronomical League in 1986 that 鈥渦ltimately the sociological impact of this new knowledge will be as great as the revolutions started by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton鈥�. That was the year that Hubble would have launched, had the Challenger space shuttle not exploded.
Yet following its launch from the Discovery space shuttle on 24 April 1990, there were early indications of problems with Hubble. The telescope was sending back blurred images. We reported suspicions that vibrations were causing this in our 19 May 1990 edition.
The first shots were still encouraging: they were already clearer than images recorded by ground-based telescopes. By July, though, the sad truth had dawned . A faulty measuring device had made the primary mirror 2 micrometres too flat, less than the width of a human hair. This meant the multibillion-dollar telescope couldn鈥檛 focus light as well as was expected.
Soon, there were plans for a repair. Five pairs of mirrors, each around the size of a postage stamp, were installed three years after Hubble launched to correct the primary mirror . 鈥淣ASA finally seems to have got something right,鈥� we reported on 22 January 1994, as 鈥渢he telescope has at last begun to produce sharp images of distant galaxies鈥�.
Hubble went on to produce a plethora of observations: there are more than 1500 mentions of it in New Scientist鈥榮 archive , including its iconic images, such as the Pillars of Creation Mike Holderness.
To find more from the archives, visit
