The Hubble Telescope Fiasco

" Where is the wise ? where is the scribe ?
where is the disputer of this world ?
hath not God made foolish
the wisdom of this world ? "

"John Bahcall expects that the telescope
will not fail to do its part. If we are
disappointed, he says,
it's not the telescope's fault or our fault.
It will be because of a lack of imagination
on the part of God."
Bahcall, John, in The New York Times Magazine, February 11, 1990, p. 59.

The 'saviour' of this world is a man made machine.
The machine is referred to as an automatic feedback control device. Without this a.f.c. device all natural man's 'achievements' will end in disaster.

The a.f.c. device is an error correcting device. In practice what it does, is to monitor the progress of a project, or activity, by means of a feedback system, and then makes error corrections, while the activity is in progress. The purpose of using the device is to ensure that the target, or goal, is achieved.

The first major project that natural man attempted without using the a.f.c. device, was the Hubble telescope project. The reason for not using a.f.c. was because from a practical standpoint, it would have been to difficult and costly to 'test' the telescope during manufacture, before putting it into orbit.

The decision was made to rather go to extreme lengths of accuracy, in manufacturing the telescope, so that there would be no need for 'testing' (error correction). The mirror was designed and built with a tolerance of less than 'a millionth of an inch', from the blueprint specification. Those who are interested should read the article entitled: "The Big Glass" (Discovery July 1989)

This is a quote from the Discovery article: " Those engineers built a mirror closer to perfection than anyone had a right to expect. " We all know what the final outcome was. I quote (G.L.Fisk) the head of NASA's office of Space and Science and Applications: " There was a mistake or error made somewhere".

The 'error' is built into natural man's mind, natural man is deluded. The 'scientists' used ZERO base mathematics in designing and building the telescope. It is not possible to use an irrational system, and expect a rational conclusion. Now you know why the Hubble telescope wears spectacles and why it is not possible to fake reality.

When the Hubble Space Telescope was put into space on 24 April 1990, Nasa called it a new window on the Universe. It entered orbit and all seemed to go well as the engineers started it up. The thermal system worked, as did the electronics, the stabilizers and the telemetry and solar panels. Then they opened the door that covered the telescope optics to take the first picture.

So-called "first-light" was on 20 May. To experienced astronomers the first-light image was disturbing. It was the wrong shape. Engineers said not to worry: "The telescope has not been adjusted properly yet." But behind the scenes, the astronomers and engineers came to realize that something was seriously wrong. Another image was taken and on that fateful day, in HST's control room in the centre of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, US, astronomer Eric Chaisson watched the faulty image appear on a computer screen. He later recalled: " I sensed a total deflation in my gut."

Five spacewalks were needed to fix Hubble It seemed incredible but Hubble's main mirror was the wrong shape and it could not focus properly. To be fair, Hubble was good, but only as good as ground-based telescopes, and they cost a fraction of Hubble's $2 billion price tag. It transpired that the central region of the mirror was flatter than it should be - by just one-fiftieth of the width of a human hair. This is equivalent to only four wavelengths of visible light, but it was enough. One insider said that the Hubble mirror was " very accurate, very accurately the wrong shape ".

What had happened was that many years before, when the mirror was being made, a speck of paint had affected an optical measuring rod. The subsequent measurements were very slightly wrong. The mirror looked perfect, but in reality it was not. In Nasa's often-ridiculous jargon, it was said to be a "failure to meet a level-one requirement". In normal language, it was a complete catastrophe. With no explanation, the daily Hubble status reports ceased and a short while later a press conference was called. At that traumatic presser, Nasa official Leonard Fisk said it was space science's equivalent of the Challenger disaster. It was said he wept. One journalist quipped: "Hubble is working perfectly but the Universe is all blurry." Hubble trouble Astronomers were devastated. Richard Ellis of the University of Cambridge Recalls: "It was desperate and very depressing.

We were the butt of jokes. Foggy view: Hubble before its repair "We could see just enough to see what we were missing," he says. But out of defeat came triumph. Hubble had been designed to be serviced and repaired in orbit by astronauts. The in-orbit repair of Hubble was one of the landmarks of manned spaceflight. A series of corrective mirrors were fixed to Hubble in an unprecedented series of five spacewalks on a single space shuttle flight. A few weeks later, Hubble once again turned its gaze towards the stars. They were sharp and crisp. As one US Senator put it: "The trouble with Hubble is over."