How did they fix the Hubble Space Telescope?
NASA sent up astronauts in the space shuttle Endeavour to manually repair the telescope. Five space walks later, the astronauts completed the repairs. They installed a device containing 10 small mirrors that intercepted the light from the primary mirror and corrected the pathway to the sensors.
What major problem did the Hubble telescope originally have and how was it corrected?
What major problem did the Hubble telescope originally have and how was it corrected? Hubble’s main mirror had a major defect, a spherical aberration caused by a manufacturing error. The flaw was just 1/50th the thickness of a sheet of paper. It took three years before NASA could mount a repair mission.
Why was the Hubble telescope repaired?
It was finally launched by Discovery in 1990, but its main mirror had been ground incorrectly, resulting in spherical aberration that compromised the telescope’s capabilities. The optics were corrected to their intended quality by a servicing mission in 1993.
Can Hubble be serviced again?
That being said, there are no plans for a new service mission. If there’s a catastrophic failure that takes Hubble entirely offline, it’s hard to see NASA greenlighting a repair mission for an observatory that’s over three decades old.
How many times has the Hubble Telescope been repaired?
Hubble has been serviced five times. Here are the highlights of each servicing mission: Servicing Mission 1 – STS-61, December 1993: A corrective optics package was installed, and the Wide Field Planetary Camera was replaced with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (including an internal optical correction system.)
Why can’t Hubble see Mercury?
Hubble has observed all the planets in our Solar System, apart from Earth and Mercury. Hubble can’t observe Mercury as it is too close to the Sun, whose brightness would damage the telescope’s sensitive instruments.
How far away from the Earth will the Webb orbit?
1.5 million kilometers
Why are we putting James Webb Space Telescope 1000000 miles away from the Earth?
The Webb won’t be orbiting the Earth –instead we will send it almost a million miles out into space to a place called “L2.” Putting a spacecraft at any of these points allows it to stay in a fixed position relative to the Earth and sun with a minimal amount of energy needed for course correction.