Monday, Jan. 24, 1994
Hubble Out of Trouble
By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK
Shortly after midnight on Dec. 18, just five days after the shuttle Endeavour returned from the daring mission to repair the Hubble telescope, scientists secretly put the refurbished instrument to its first test. They ordered the Hubble to point toward a bright star and beam its image to Earth. Anxiously, they crowded around a computer screen at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, as they waited for the picture to appear. The Endeavour astronauts had installed the telescope's corrective lenses and other equipment perfectly. But it wasn't certain that the devices would actually work. As the star's image came up on the screen, the scientists stared for a second -- then burst into cheers. The Hubble, hobbled for nearly four years by an improperly ground mirror, was going to be as good as new.
In fact, said ASA administrator Daniel Goldin, presenting the first images from the born-again telescope at a press conference last week, "it's better than new. The telescope now gathers light four times as efficiently as it did before the repairs." Its eyesight is so sharp, say scientists, that if it were sitting in Washington, it could spot a firefly in Tokyo.
That's not hard to believe, considering the before and after pictures NASA unveiled. Blurred blobs have turned into sharp, clean images of galaxies, super-novas and stars. But, says senior project scientist David Leckrone, "these are the very first test images. We're not pushing the telescope to its limits yet." As they do, scientists will almost certainly be able to start solving some of astronomy's greatest mysteries: How old is the universe? Do giant black holes lurk at the cores of galaxies? How did the galaxies get formed? Are there planets circling other stars? And besides searching for those answers, the Hubble will treat astronomers to a clear, close view of a space spectacular in July: the collision between comet Shoemaker-Levy 1993e and Jupiter.