The universe was a different-looking place 20 years ago. The most powerful optical telescopes on Earth could see only halfway across the cosmos. Estimates for the age of the universe disagreed by a big margin. Supermassive black holes were only suspected to be the powerhouses behind a rare zoo of energetic phenomena seen at great distances. Einstein's cosmological constant, a hypothesized repulsive property of space, was merely a skeleton in the astrophysics closet.
But astronomy was kicked-started into fast-forward on April 24th, 1990 when NASA's Hubble Space Telescope left the blurry skies of Earth for the stars. Tucked away inside the space shuttle Discovery's cargo bay, the telescope was set free into low earth orbit on April 25th.
What lay ahead for the sparkling new observatory was two decades of hard work and dedication by scientists, engineers, and brave astronaut crews that would make Hubble the most well-recognized and celebrated science instrument in all of human history.
Pre-Launch Jitters
But on the eve of Hubble’s April 1990 launch I had the jitters. "I just hope the damn thing (Hubble) works ..." I was quoted by a Baltimore Sun's science writer. I was only joking with a little gallows humor, but it would presage the coming two decades.
What I could not imagine that day was how the future history of the telescope would play out. I expected something like a science fiction fantasy come true. But instead it was more like living the "Perils of Pauline." Over 20 years the revered telescope would come close to the brink of disaster again and again only to rebound back to life like a cat with nine lives.
The never-ending drama even had a "Snidely Whiplash" at one point. In 2004 NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe canceled the 5th space shuttle servicing mission to Hubble citing astronaut safety concerns in the post-Columbia accident era. But Hubble's death sentence was overturned by O’Keefe's successor Michael Griffin who burst onto the scene like Luke Skywalker. Griffin had the "Rebel Alliance" of the America public behind him. People wanted their beloved Hubble pictures. The thought of letting Hubble go was as bad as shooting Walt Disney's Old Yeller.
SLIDE SHOW: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of 2009.
Early Hubble Trouble Bursts Bubble
Just two months after launch, the discovery of a misshapen eight-foot diameter primary mirror that sent back blurry pictures burst the Hubble-bubble. Some astronomers who were bent on jealously guarding their anticipated Hubble images lost all their hubris. It was like "fighting over the deck chairs on the Titanic," one scientist said.
A Toronto Globe science reporter said that I had the "world's best crummy job" as Hubble's news director. With humility and honesty my staff and NASA Public Affairs slogged through a media barrage and ridicule and hyper-investigative journalism, largely by non-science reporters. (The science reporters were too broken hearted to trash us, expressing more sympathy than anger over Hubble's embarrassing plight). The news of the misshapen mirror hit the fan so quickly, we were unprepared. When asked by a New York Times reporter for the Space Telescope Science Institute's reaction, all I could pull together was: "Obviously we're disappointed..."
Overnight Hubble became the Rodney Dangerfield of big science. The telescope's name didn’t help. It rhymed with trouble. We scramble to show the best of what Hubble's blurry vision could do. The early monochrome engineering pictures still beat out what could be done with ground-based telescopes of the time.
The Comeback Kid
The telescope was repaired with precision "contact lenses" in a wildly popular servicing mission in December 1993. Hubble was now the Rocky Balboa of space science. Even the name "Hubble" evolved in pop culture. Its first definition was: "making an extraordinarily stupid mistake at outrageous expense," i.e. "to Hubble." But when the space telescope started returning spectacular pictures the word "Hubble" became synonymous with awesome visual power.
In 1994 we turned the corner in getting the media's respect when National Public Radio's Art Silverman wrote a poem that drew a distinction between Hubble the telescope and Webster Hubbell, the ex-Clinton aid who admitted billing the federal government and other clients for nearly $400,000 in phony expenses to cover some personal purchases, including garments from Victoria's Secret:
Hubbell, Hubble, what a muddle.
One's in space, and one's trouble.
Shedding light on cosmic order, or telling all about Whitewater.
Big time lawyers breaking laws, mirrors cured of tiny flaws.
Colliding worlds quite far away, or buying fancy lingerie.
From Little Dipper to Little Rock, from Ozark Hill to Mr. Spock.
With Hubbell stories you must spell. Is it NASA or an S&L?
The Big Picture Show
When I joined the Hubble project in 1986 -- just three months after the Challenger disaster -- I was intellectually excited about what the telescope might discover. I imagined we'd see lots galaxies, and pretty nebulae and ringed planets.
But I never imagined that so many pictures would look as eerie as they do. The most iconic photo, gaseous stalagmite features in the Eagle nebula, which I coined the "pillars of creation," grabbed public attention immediately. It simply didn’t look like what people expected in space. It looked organic and alien.
Hubble's photos immediately became evocative, visceral and even spiritual for the broad public. One lady called me and said that she saw the entire Book of Ezekiel in a pre-supernova star Eta Carina. So great were Hubble’s powers perceived, that when Weekly World News reported that Hubble had photographed Heaven in 1994, I received numerous requests for the photo.
The most jaw-dropping if not downright spiritual picture for me came in 2002, after the Powerful Advanced Camera for Surveys was installed on Servicing Mission 3b. We had inadvertently taken a longer-than-planned exposure of an early "pretty picture" of a galaxy with a tidal tail. The background sky is what flabbergasted me. It was a sea of tiny background galaxies of all shapes, sizes and colors. It was like looking at myriad pond life microorganisms under the microscope for the first time. "This is the way God intended the universe to be seen..." I mused.
Hubble's Legacy
The cosmos was certainly a more staid looking place before Hubble unveiled a cataclysmic, discordant and evolving universe where matter an energy shape stars, planets and nebula against a backdrop of galaxies that seems unimaginably deep.
Hubble has revealed secrets of the universe that humans had only been able to probe in their imaginations through much of recorded history. Hubble has carried us on a space odyssey of discovery to distant places and times unreachable by physical travel across space.
Now, nearly 20 years after launch, the scale of the Hubble revolution is becoming increasingly apparent: black holes are common to galaxies, planetary atmospheres have organic chemistry, dark energy seems to behave like Einstein’s cosmological constant, galaxies were rapidly born and quickly evolved through collisions and mergers, stars die in a blaze of glory that is as exciting as it is scary.
Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens best captured my feelings for the Hubble images when he wrote:
"If you devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome, mysterious and beautiful -- and more chaotic overwhelming and foreboding, -- than any creation or ‘end of days’ story."
The telescope is alive and well and better than ever today. Hubble continues pushing back the frontiers of knowledge in spectacular ways. Bigger space telescopes are on the drawing boards, such as the James Webb Space Telescope. But when Hubble has at last shut down we’ll miss it. If something exciting is happening somewhere in the universe, astronomers and public alike will say:
“Gee, if we only had a Hubble...”
Tags: Hubble Telescope, NASA
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