We're used to seeing NASA fire up its rockets
and launch billions of dollars of equipment into space.
But what happens when it messes up?
The Hubble Space Telescope Project has suffered yet another setback.
And how do you fix a $1,000,000,000 mistake up in space?
I did not have a line item that says:
‘NASA put wrong mirror in telescope.’
With engineers needing to fix it,
not once, but twice.
So, the summer 2021 event was a pretty intense anomaly.
This is the story of how the Hubble Space Telescope
nearly destroyed NASA's reputation.
And the retired engineer,
that helped bring the telescope back from the brink both times.
When I received the call,
I was honoured that they would think of me
to try and help them resolve this.
This is electrical engineer Ron Barasch.
I started working on Hubble in 1987,
approximately two years before launch.
Hubble was one of the most ambitious space projects the world had ever seen.
NASA had spent hundreds of millions designing a massive mirror in the telescope,
to get the sharpest pictures of the universe ever seen.
Expectations were high.
It promised to catapult space science into a radical new era.
And all eyes were on it.
And lift-off of the Space Shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Our window on the universe.
It was very exciting to watch the launch.
You have a go to open the doors.
And even more exciting to verify that our system was functioning flawlessly,
when it was turned on in orbit.
Very exciting.
NASA was quick to champion it as the greatest advance in astronomy since Galileo.
But then disaster struck.
The Hubble Space Telescope Project has suffered yet another setback.
Engineers have discovered that the giant telescope has a warped mirror,
which means the images sent back to NASA are distorted.
The pictures are little better than those from ground-based telescopes.
We found out that there was distortion in the image.
Well the images I saw were blurry.
They called it ‘spherical aberration’.
When light enters the telescope,
it's reflected first by a large eight-foot mirror
onto a smaller secondary mirror,
which concentrates the light onto the cameras.
If either mirror is slightly out of true,
the picture becomes distorted.
And that's exactly what had happened.
The mirror hadn't been tested with the rest of Hubble.
Had it been tested,
the scientists would have seen that the mirror was ground incorrectly,
by just 1/50th of a human hair.
Tiny,
but enough to ruin everything.
Everyone on the project was very disappointed.
And it was an embarrassment that we've spent so much time on the programme.
And that there was a significant flaw.
The news was not very kind to the project.
Well, the American taxpayer, they're not going to be happy.
Well, look, you launched this $2bn white elephant.
What are you going to do?
And the bad news kept coming,
as NASA's reputation received blow, after blow, after blow.
Matter of fact, my sister said to me, ‘You worked on Hubble.’
‘That's an embarrassment to the United States.’
But despite the setback,
there were still some that had hope for Hubble.
So do not write off the Hubble Telescope.
It merely means it's not going to be quite so good as expected until the repairs are carried out.
Replacing the mirror wasn't practical.
So instead, Ron and the rest of the team created an instrument called COSTAR,
which would act almost like a pair of glasses,
redirecting the light to account for the flaw in the mirror.
My job was to provide an electronics interface box called the Remote Interface Unit,
COSTAR.
Three years after Hubble's embarrassing start,
they finally had the parts needed to fix the broken Hubble Space Telescope.
All that was needed now,
was a team of astronauts bold enough, daring enough,
to attempt a mission of this magnitude.
There weren't very many of us in the office at that time who had done spacewalks.
And so that's how I got kind of a quick turnaround from one flight to the next.
You know, in all the failures,
the hundreds and hundreds of failures I came up with,
that I had to accommodate,
I did not have a line item that says, ‘NASA put wrong mirror in telescope’.
Kathryn Thornton and Story Musgrave
were two of the astronauts that were selected for the mission.
And in 1993, they set off.
The world held its breath as the astronauts carried out five back-to-back spacewalks
in an attempt to bring Hubble,
back from the brink.
The first spacewalk on Hubble.
Did the dance.
When the music starts, what are you going to do?
Well, you got a power tool, and you unbolt the thing.
You undo the connection, zip, zip.
Stick it in the box.
Hang it over there.
Get the new one out.
Slide the new one in.
It's fingertips, baby.
Fingertips.
That's what's so awesome about Hubble.
It's almost like plug and play.
We installed COSTAR.
We installed a co-processor on the computer to give it more memory.
Added a new magnetometer.
And other ‘cats and dogs’, as we called it.
It is easy.
You've got to make it easy.
Around the world, astronomers anxiously awaited the first pictures from Hubble's new camera.
On the 18th of December 1993,
the results came in.
Whoa!
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
Right there!
Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
Did it!
When the image hit the monitor, oh God everyone screamed!
Just...’God it's fixed!’
That is better than any deconvolution you've ever seen.
Yeah, those are actually stars.
I think you got it. Yep.
Yep.
Sir, can be a little premature but I'll shake your hand.
When the images first came back and I saw them,
made me feel proud that I was part of that mission.
And that we had brought the telescope back to what it was supposed to be.
As a matter of fact,
my understanding is the images were clearer
than what they had ever expected.
To the relief of Ron, NASA and the entire world,
Hubble was finally fixed.
And it immediately began to deliver on its original promise,
allowing us to see the universe in ways we could previously only dream about.
Hubble was only supposed to last 15 years.
Instead,
it continued to make groundbreaking discoveries for more than 30.
But then, in 2021,
it suddenly shut down.
And the team at NASA once again had to fight for Hubble's survival.
So, the summer 2021 event was a pretty intense anomaly.
Probably one of the more dramatic ones that we've had.
Nzinga Tull is the anomaly response manager for Hubble
and it was her job to figure out why Hubble's computer had shut down
and ultimately find a away to get it back up and running.
But that was far easier said than done.
So, Nzinga had to think outside the box.
After the first few days,
and it wasn't immediately apparent that we could get a path forward to resume science.
Uh, we knew we'd have to pull in a lot more folks.
With Hubble still showing no signs of life,
Nzinga knew she needed some very niche expertise to try and help fix Hubble.
So, she called upon Hubble's original architects,
to come back and get stuck in.
When I received the call,
I was honoured that they would think of me to try and help them resolve this.
Any time you work on a system like this,
it's part of you.
It's, if there's ever a problem with a spacecraft in orbit,
everyone jumps in and works on it, even if you're retired.
A lot of people were concerned that we would not be able to fix the Hubble.
It was very stressful.
The last thing I wanted was to have the system that I spent 18 years of my life on
to be the cause of the end of the mission.
And so, I was under a lot of stress.
But undeterred by the challenge,
the team set to work to identify what went wrong and get Hubble back online.
The telescope was down for approximately four weeks.
I think the first couple of weeks was probably the most frustrating
and the most anxiety-producing.
We put together what's known as a fishbone diagram.
Everything that could possibly cause the problem was written down
and we eliminated them one by one until we zeroed in on the exact cause.
It was amazing how everything came back to me.
On July 15th,
Nzinga and her team successfully powered up the backup computer on board Hubble.
and over the next few days,
the team gradually brought the science instruments back online.
Once we realised that we had solved the problem,
the telescope was back up and running.
That was quite a relief.
Mainly relief. Mainly a lot of relief.
How did it feel compared to 93?
In my case, it was even better.
This was my system that stopped.
That had halted the telescope.
And to be able to get it back up and running was very proud.
I was very proud when after the first servicing mission,
that we got the telescope up and running.
But this was more personal.
If another problem comes up,
I'd be very proud to work on it with this team again to resolve any future issues.
It would be an honour and a privilege for me to be called back
to support Hubble at any point in time.
I will always be a Hubble-hugger.