Original subtitles

Lift off of the Space Shuttle Discovery

With the Hubble Space Telescope.

CAPCOM, we have a go for release.

It may be the boldest experiment ever undertaken in astronomy...

with a legacy that will endure for centuries.

You have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Hubble Space Telescope is probably the most scientifically

Productive instrument in history.

This single tool... the Hubble Space Telescope...

Has revealed the size and age of the universe,

The birthplace of stars, and the existence of black holes.

It's helped us find planets like our own

In far-off solar systems

And a mysterious force... Dark energy...

That makes up about 70% of the universe.

The Hubble Space Telescope has completely changed the way

That we as scientists understand the universe.

The story of Hubble is a story of discovery.

It's also the story

Of one of the biggest blunders in the history of science.

This is the moment we find out

That we are doomed to failure.

Is it possible that you could bring the telescope back?

And of the genius and courage that saved the day.

The moment of truth is coming.

You can't run from it anymore, it's coming, there it is.

Now, on Hubble's 25th anniversary,

NOVA tells the remarkable tale

Of how this magnificent machine was built,

How it has solved some of our most enduring mysteries,

And how it is showing us a universe

As beautiful as it is astonishing.

"Invisible Universe Revealed"... Right now on NOVA.

Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following:

At Cance NOVA and promoting public understanding of science.

And the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

And by:

And Millicent Bell through:

Since the dawn of humanity, we've looked to the heavens

And wondered, how old is the universe?

How many stars are there in the sky?

Are there other planets out there like our own?

But in the last 25 years, there's been a revolution...

All because of a machine called Hubble.

Traveling in space,

High above the distortions of our atmosphere,

Gives this giant telescope great power.

It's the size of a school bus.

It's traveling at 17,000 miles an hour.

It's 300-and-something miles above your head.

But in there is one of the most precise mirrors

Mankind has ever built.

Billions of times more sensitive than our own eyes,

The space telescope

Has literally brought the universe to us,

Making more than a million observations.

One legendary image is called the "Pillars of Creation."

It's a giant plume of gas and dust where stars are born.

Our own sun probably formed in a place like this.

The whole region is something like 400 trillion miles,

So it's massive, it's huge.

But still within the context of our own Milky Way,

It's just one little part.

Hubble has also captured pictures

Of places where stars die.

These are planetary nebulae... Remnants of expiring stars.

They look like artworks in the heavens.

Each one of them is different, like snowflakes.

And these are some of the most spectacular images

That Hubble has produced.

Hubble has shown us that black holes are real.

A giant one sits at the center of our galaxy

And nearly every other we know.

It's discovered the age of the universe

And that there are more stars in the heavens

Than grains of sand on all the beaches and deserts

Of the world combined.

Over the past 25 years,

Hubble has told us a story of creation, destruction,

And of vast, new mysteries that beckon our curiosity.

But putting it in space long seemed an impossible dream,

Even to those who took on the challenge.

I started out in optical astronomy and spectroscopy.

But as a woman in my generation,

I could not get tenure at a research institution.

In 1959, when NASA was formed,

One of the men there asked me if I knew anyone

Who would like to set up a program in space astronomy.

And I decided that the idea

Of influencing astronomy for 50 years

Was just more than I could resist, so I took the job.

Astronomer Nancy Roman is known as the mother of the Hubble.

She worked on its design and development for nearly 25 years.

If I brought anything to it, it was perseverance

And belief that it was possible.

The idea of a space telescope

Was first seriously proposed in 1946

By Princeton scientist Lyman Spitzer.

He was the scientific visionary,

And Roman was the force that pushed this vision forward,

Decades before the technology was up to the task.

Even into the mid-'60s,

Just getting a rocket safely into space was a challenge.

There were a lot of failures.

We were babies learning how to walk.

And we didn't always succeed.

Babies fall down,

And we did too.

But however far-fetched at the time,

The lure of getting a telescope

Above the distortion of the earth's atmosphere was strong.

The major challenge facing astronomers

Was the twinkle of the stars.

Twinkling stars are an inspiring source of poetry,

But in terms of observing stars, it's not very good.

If you can imagine

You're swimming on the bottom of the swimming pool

And you look up and you see the distortion.

It's like a fun house mirror.

That's what it's like

To study stars from the surface of the Earth.

The atmosphere is just like that water in that pool.

It sloshes around and moves and distorts the image.

But when you come up out of the water, everything's clear.

That's exactly what happens

When a telescope gets above the atmosphere.

In the pristine vacuum of space, light can travel

For billions of light years, undisturbed.

The atmosphere not only distorts light,

It prevents some from reaching the ground at all.

So for those reasons, astronomers for a long time

Were eager to get something outside.

And so I got a committee together,

And that was the beginning of the Hubble.

The space telescope was named for Edwin Hubble,

The great astronomer who did much of his pioneering work

In the 1920s at Mt. Wilson Observatory in California.

In those days, our own galaxy, the Milky Way,

Was considered the entirety of the universe.

Nearly everyone, even Einstein, believed the universe

Had existed forever in its present state...

That it was eternal and unchanging.

But Hubble would prove them all wrong.

He began by figuring out

How far away the stars he was seeing actually were.

At the time of Edwin Hubble,

It was hard to measure distances.

It still is even today.

It's difficult to know if a star appears bright

Because it is actually bright

Or simply because it is close to us.

So Hubble searched for a rare type of star

Called a Cepheid variable.

Cepheids pulse at a known brightness,

So by measuring the amount of light he could see,

He could calculate how far away the star actually was.

In October 1923,

Hubble found a Cepheid in a gaseous cluster of stars

Then called the Andromeda nebula.

It yielded a shocking discovery.

When he actually did the calculations,

He discovered Andromeda

Was roughly a million light years away from us,

Which is outside our galaxy.

Andromeda was its own galaxy.

Oh, there are other galaxies out there,

And we're just one of them.

For the first time in history, there was evidence

That our universe stretched far beyond the Milky Way.

But then what he did was he measured the speed

Of a whole bunch of these galaxies.

Edwin Hubble measured speed

By looking at the light the galaxies emitted.

He knew if the galaxy was moving toward him,

The waves would shorten

And shift to the blue part of the spectrum.

If it was moving away,

The waves would lengthen and shift to the red.

Every distant galaxy Hubble looked at,

He saw the light from it being red-shifted,

Which meant everything is moving away from everything else.

And he found the further away they were,

The faster they were going.

In fact, the universe itself was expanding,

Stretching the light from the galaxies.

Edwin Hubble had changed

Our understanding of the cosmos forever.

The whole universe was clearly expanding.

And so this was the discovery

Of the expansion of the universe.

You know, which Einstein said, "Well, that's crazy, right?"

The discovery of the expansion of the universe of course

Was a very strong piece of evidence for a beginning.

If everything is now expanding, you can run this backwards

And see that everything should have started

From a certain point or singularity,

What we today call a Big Bang.

That was pretty radical

And mind-blowing stuff back in the '20s and '30s,

And some people today even find it mind-blowing.

K

Hubble's discovery opened up the modern era of astronomy

And raised huge questions, like "How old is the universe?"

But astronomers couldn't see clearly and deeply enough

Into the cosmos, so the mystery would endure for decades.

Determining the age of the universe

Was definitely one of the key goals

Of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomers used to have fistfights

Whether the universe was ten billion years

Or 20 billion years old

Until we launched the Hubble Telescope.

But first, they would have to build it.

I realized that

My job at NASA to a large extent was salesmanship.

And it was a particular problem with Congress.

We can cut the space program sharply.

Congress has already cut that $400 million

And I think we can cut it a billion dollars,

And we should cut it a billion dollars.

Proxmire was quite famous as a senator

Of picking out projects that he thought were stupid.

We have a war going on in Vietnam.

And he asked NASA why the American taxpayer

Should pay for something like the Hubble.

And I came up with the answer that

For the cost of a night at the movies,

Every American would have 15 years of exciting discovery.

Finally, after more than a decade,

The plans were approved in 1977.

Hubble's power would come from an eight-foot wide mirror.

It would gather light from across the universe.

To magnify the sky and see tiny details,

It would need a long distance to focus the light

And give a clear image.

But a space telescope needs to be compact,

So Hubble would use a second mirror

To further magnify the light and focus it onto the cameras.

For it to work, the mirrors would have to be perfect.

Hubble was the most precise optical mirror ever made.

No place along its surface

Could have deviated from a perfect curve

By more than a millionth of an inch.

An optics company, Perkin-Elmer, was chosen to do the work,

In part because it had already made mirrors for spy satellites.

They told NASA,

"We know how to do this, and this technology is proprietary.

"We are not going to let you come in

And watch what we are doing."

So NASA got a rather limited view

Of what was going on in that little group.

They had very, very precise instruments

That they designed just for polishing this mirror.

They had to work at night

So that the vibration of cars in the parking lot

Wouldn't cause problems with the polishing equipment.

They had to isolate it and float it on a table

So any vibrations from the building wouldn't come in.

And this program was over budget, behind schedule.

They were desperate to get the telescope built and flown.

Perkin-Elmer's own measurements

Showed discrepancies in the surface of the mirror,

But this was never passed on to NASA.

The telescope was declared ready for launch,

A disaster waiting to happen.

The hopes and dreams of the world's astronomers

Were with us that day at Cape Canaveral.

The last time astronomers

Leapt a factor of ten in observing capability

Was when Galileo, in 1610, instead of using his eye,

Put the telescope in front of his eye.

And liftoff of the Space Shuttle Discovery

With the Hubble Space Telescope, our window on the universe!

All increases in capability after Galileo were incremental.

They weren't leaps of a factor of ten, until Hubble.

Mission Control, Houston.

Roger all, Discovery.

We thought, "Let's go, we're off to the races!"

Little did we know the time bomb that was ticking.

Little did we know.

Discover Houston.

You have a go to open the doors.

After nearly 30 years of planning, on April 25, 1990,

Astronauts used a robotic arm

To deploy the Hubble space telescope in orbit

380 miles above the earth.

CAPCOM, we have a go for release.

We concur, Charlie.

Mission control, Houston confirms,

The Hubble Space Telescope is released.

With the telescope finally in place,

Everyone was excited to see what it could do.

make final adjustments before we get to see

The clearest pictures ever seen in the history of astronomy.

Nose gear touch down.

But when the first images arrived,

They weren't quite what the scientists had expected.

When they first saw these images

They just assumed the telescope wasn't in focus.

They tried to move the focus backwards and forwards,

But the light kept being blurred like it was always out of focus.

It was really quite a shock.

We were very worried.

I just couldn't believe it.

It definitely was a huge shock.

We were supposed to revolutionize astronomy.

How is it that we can't focus this telescope?

How is this even possible?

After weeks of investigation, horrified astronomers suspected

Something was wrong with the mirror.

This is my logbook that I kept during the early days of Hubble.

Daily, we went to meetings, and we kept a record

Of everything that was happening.

Here is a particularly interesting day.

We were told about the actuators on the back of the mirror.

The actuators might be able to fix small errors

In the surface of the mirror by pushing and pulling on it,

So this says, "One half wave is 7 times the dynamic range,"

Meaning the problem is seven times worse than they could fix.

And here's a little note I wrote:

"This is the moment we find out that we are doomed to failure!"

Sandra Faber and her colleagues

Realized that the problem was massive

And lay at the very heart of the telescope.

The Hubble telescope

Has a big primary mirror that collects the light,

And then there's a secondary mirror

Which reflects the light back down to the detector.

So if everything is working, every zone of the primary mirror

Should come to a focus at exactly the same location.

With a single focal point,

A star would appear crisp and bright.

But this wasn't what was happening.

As I looked at those star images,

I could see that the problem with Hubble

Was the rays are coming to a focus at different points.

And that is the classic problem called spherical aberration.

This is the actual set of images that my team presented

That convinced people of the spherical aberration.

The top set of images is simulated with software,

The bottom is the actual images, and the fact that they match

Is what shows that we really understood what was going on.

That was the kiss of death.

It was like a bullet to the head.

So I said, "Well, what are we going to do?"

Should we declare this telescope to be junk and just end it?

Can we use it in its present form

And get something out of it?

Can we fix it?

And all of those thoughts were running through people's minds

In those fateful days after this discovery.

Somehow, the mirror had been polished too flat,

And there might not be anything anyone could do to fix it.

It was probably early June

When people starting saying the "S" word...

Spherical aberration.

That lead up to the infamous press conference

That I'll never forget as long as I live.

What might have made this happen?

Do you know for sure that that the aberration

Is in the primary mirror, the secondary mirror, both?

Why wasn't it caught on the ground?

This was one of the most expensive science projects

That NASA had ever undertaken, and it was a techno-turkey.

Is it possible that you could bring the telescope back?

It was an absolute disaster.

And so it became life and death for NASA itself.

It was the national joke.

We went from being the heroes of the universe

To the Mr. Magoos,

And being associated with the telescope was difficult.

A NASA board of inquiry searched for clues to what went wrong.

Inspecting every piece of every tool used to polish the mirror,

They found the smoking gun: a few missing chips of paint.

They had thrown off the laser-guided measuring tool

Used to shape the mirror.

Everything was off about a millimeter.

And so they polished the edges of the mirror a little too flat,

About 1/50th of the thickness of a human hair.

Many feared this meant Hubble was dead,

Since the mirror was hard to access

And impossible to remove in space.

Sandra Faber was on the panel tasked with finding a solution.

A blue ribbon committee convened.

People were thinking about everything

From bringing the telescope down

To having astronauts go up in orbit

And swim down into the tube

And install correcting optics in front of the primary mirror.

I called the report, jokingly,

"50 bad ways to fix a space telescope."

The best idea was to put small corrective mirrors

In front of the cameras and other instruments.

But the problem was getting the mirrors inside the telescope.

Jim Crocker was an engineer in charge of Hubble operations.

We got to the point where it's like,

"We're kind of running out of ideas here

"and not sure what to do.

"There's a lot of ways to fix this,

There's just no way to perform them in space."

I actually came back from the meeting

And went back to the hotel that we were staying at

And I thought,

"Well, I'll take a shower before we go out to dinner."

The showerhead is on a sliding rod,

And the head goes up and down.

And so I turned the water on and I slid it up,

And then it was like it clicked.

If we packaged the mirrors into a little robotic arm

And we put that arm into a new instrument,

You could raise this mirror up and flip the little mirrors out

In front of each of the other instruments

And correct them all.

And I thought, "Huh, that'll work."

NASA agreed and immediately started work.

Astronauts would install an instrument called Costar.

Once in place, its four arms would flip out,

Like the showerhead,

And essentially give Hubble glasses.

But no one had ever done anything

Remotely this intricate in space.

When I got the job,

I didn't smile and I didn't celebrate anything.

I says, "Here we go.

I'll do the best I can with this."

I told NASA and I told the media,

They're all saying we're going to fix it,

And I told them, "I don't know if we're going to fix it."

Musgrave and a team of astronauts

Trained for 20 months preparing to fix Hubble.

We choreograph this dance down to every finger and every toe.

You know, a great ballerina, it's every finger and every toe.

You can't have something messed up.

You can't exactly mimic what you're going to do there.

So in your imagination, you watch yourself work.

Then it is practice,

So that you can pull it off when you have to.

To simulate working in space,

The astronauts spent 400 hours underwater

Rehearsing on a mock-up of Hubble.

I think the most incredible thing about this

Is that the astronauts were prepared to risk their lives

To go and fix a scientific instrument.

We know the shuttle was not a perfect machine.

After all, there's been two disasters.

I had a one-in-ten chance of dying.

I don't like those odds.

But it's not a matter of fear.

You've decided ahead of time it's what you do in life.

And we have lift-off.

Lift-off of the Space Shuttle Endeavour

On an ambitious mission

To service the Hubble Space Telescope.

In eight minutes,

They went from zero to 17,500 miles an hour.

It's rough, and the vibrations are very rough.

It's a butterfly bolted onto a bullet,

You know, that's what's going on.

It takes the crew two days to catch up to the telescope.

As soon as I caught that bright star out there,

It had to be Hubble, nothing else.

The moment of truth is coming.

You can't run from it anymore, it's coming.

There it is.

Endeavor, keep monitors disabled,

And you've got a go for capture.

The crew will do five spacewalks...

At the time, the most ever attempted on a single mission.

Okay, visors as required.

On the third walk, Musgrave and astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman

Need to replace Hubble's wide field camera.

It was designed to capture a broad range of light frequencies

Across a large area of the sky.

Oh, look at that baby, beautiful spanking new!

The most critical moment