![]() Such a distortion is called "spherical aberration." Hubble was designed to focus at least 70% of incoming light into a small circle, but its faulty mirror meant that it could only focus 15% of that light. Though that doesn't sound like much, this tiny error had enormous repercussions. It was made too shallow to deal with this situation by just two microns. The consequence of this was that the outer edge of Hubble's main mirror had been inadvertently ground to the wrong specifications. In other words, the reflective null corrector was operating as though it were 1.3mm out of position. This exposed a spot of bare metal that the lasers were reflecting off of instead of what they were meant to reflect from. It was found that, on one of the reflective null correctors, a flake of paint had chipped off, gone unnoticed. (Image credit: NASA/STScI)Ī subsequent investigation found out what had happened, a catastrophic error dating all the way back to the grounding of the telescope that had remained hidden all that time, like a ticking time bomb. On the left is an image of the galaxy M100 taken by Hubble before its vision was fixed on the right is the first image taken after Hubble was repaired, showing the difference in clarity. Had $1.5 billion been wasted on a telescope with flawed vision? The images were blurred and an icy chill swept through the NASA hierarchy. Within a few days, Hubble was active and beaming images back down to Earth, but something was wrong. Yet those cheers swiftly turned to tears. Then, on April 24, 1990, its time finally came as it roared into space aboard the space shuttle Discovery to cheers in mission control and from astronomers all over the world. The Challenger disaster that happened in January of that year led to a three-year cessation of space shuttle launches while the accident was investigated. This grid was maintained by a device called a reflective null corrector, which is a fancy name for a metal rod with an end cap into which a hole is bored for a laser to enter and reflect off a panel of bare metal.īy 1981, the mirror was complete two years later it was mated with the other components of the telescope, and was set to launch on board a space shuttle in 1986 - only for tragedy to intervene. Aside from that general timeline, though, there’s no opening date yet for the expansion.Because such accuracy is beyond the vision of the human eye, technicians used a grid of lasers to measure the mirror's curvature. A year and a half in, Endeavour will be taken off display and moved into the new Air and Space Center, which will then continue to be built around the orbiter. With construction now technically underway, the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center is expected to take three years to construct. Samuel Oschin Family Foundation between that and other donations, it’s currently raised $280 million of its $400 million goal. Its forthcoming home comes thanks to the museum’s largest-ever gift from the Mr. One of only three remaining space shuttle orbiters that’ve been to space and back (and the only one on display on the West Coast), Endeavour first left Earth’s surface in 1992 and, after 25 flights, was retired in 2011. The new 20-story building, which will occupy an area in Exposition Park between the existing museum and the California African American Museum, will double the Science Center’s display space, with 150 exhibits (including additional aircraft and spacecraft) across three level of galleries dedicated to flight and the exploration of the universe. Rendering: Courtesy ZGF/California Science Center Rendering: Courtesy ZGF/California Science Center Rendering: Courtesy ZGF/California Science Center ![]() Renderings of the space show guests able to gawk at the ship from various vertical levels: from below the engines all the way up to above the nose on a glass-bottomed platform, with two stops in between. On Wednesday, the California Science Center broke ground on the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, a 200,000-square-foot add-on to the museum that’ll display Endeavour, an orange external fuel tank and a pair of rocket boosters in a vertical, ready-to-launch position. Now, that new home is finally on the horizon. ![]() in 2012, Endeavour has been housed horizontally in a tightly-fitted temporary structure at the museum, with a small model that’s teased its eventual permanent digs for about the past decade. It was built in Palmdale, flew about 123 million miles around the Earth and then eventually returned home for its retirement, where it was jubilantly paraded across city streets and into its final resting place at the California Science Center. Who’s had the toughest commute in all of L.A.? Sorry 405 stalwarts, but it’s the Space Shuttle Endeavour. ![]()
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