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The Camera that Saved Hubble
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Hubble is all about imagery.  It’s all about taking clear, sharp, beautiful pictures of the sky…
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Title - David Leckrone, Senior Project Scientist, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center …and doing fantastic science with those images.
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Title - 1993.  Hubble Telescope in Kennedy Space Center Clean Room before Launch
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Title -  Ed Weiler, Acting Assistant Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate - The story of the Hubble Space Telescope launch is best…   
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The way I like to describe it is…
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Title -  April 24, 1990 …climbing to the top of Mt. Everest and then suddenly, within a couple of months, 
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of sinking to the bottom of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth.
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Title -  3 months later:  “Hubble Trouble” - 
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We were having trouble focusing the telescope, and we noticed that Wide Field Camera pictures that were coming down were fuzzy, fuzzy blobs instead of nice, sharp points. 
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And over the course of early June we started to get worried.  Maybe, maybe there’s something wrong with the mirror itself.  
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You can’t believe how down every astronomer on the Hubble team was that day, 
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because we were about to announce to the world we…   we messed up. We don’t have the telescope we thought.
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Title -  May 22, 1990 - The conclusion we’ve come to from that…
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Title -  Douglas Broome, Program Manager, Hubble Space Telescope …is that there’s a significant spherical aberration appears to be present in the optics. 
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And the simplest way of understanding it is…
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Title -  Mirror in clean room  …that when you have a mirror that’s focusing, the light all comes together at a single point is the objective of the exercise.   
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You want the light to come together and focus at a single point.  
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When you have spherical aberration, it says that there’s some disfigurement of that mirror that causes the light, 
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instead of focusing at a single point, to be spread across a region in space. 
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And, suddenly, in the press was born the term “Hubble Trouble.”
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I remember giving a talk to some young kids.
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Title -  John Trauger, WFPC2 Principal Investigator, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory - They were kindergarten kids.  Really young kids.  
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About the wonders, you know, of  Hubble. And I said the word “Hubble Telescope.”  And it was like I was Jay Leno.  Everybody laughed.
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So it was a very sad, very difficult time.  And some people left the program and went off in disgust.
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Title -  A Ray of Hope
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John gave me this one ray of hope.  It was that one little ray of hope that I glommed onto.
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We played with it.  We played with the model.  And we realized that if the error were in the primary mirror, we could make our correction…
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Title -  Path of light inside Hubble …with a little mirror about the size of a nickel inside our camera.  
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So we purposefully made the mirror in our instrument, and therefore our whole camera, out of focus.  With a minus sign.  
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It was as profoundly out of focus as the Hubble Telescope was.  Exactly.  And that was not easy.    
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We were finishing up the final optical alignment, and NASA Administrator Dan Goldin visited JPL.  We went to the clean room, and he said, “What’s going on here?”  
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Larry Simmons, the Project Manager, says, “Well, we’re here to fix the Hubble Telescope.” And his response was, “No. You’re here to save the agency.”  
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That was a clear message to us that it was important.  We shall not fail.
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Title -  Shuttle Servicing Mission 1, December  6, 1993
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Astronauts  OK.   Are you ready for me to let go?
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Shortly after the mission was over, we brought WFPC2 online.
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We’d done everything that we thought we had to do.  But there’s no substitute for seeing that it actually did work. 
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Title - December 18, 1993, Awaiting first image from new camera
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The first image came. And it looked really good.  I mean it looked just the way it should look.
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Hubble team - Cheers.
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Title -  January 13, 1994 - We did like 9 press in a row with primarily WIFPC pictures.  Every single one made front-page news across the world.  
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It took this camera being put in the Hubble in 1993 to really start the career of Hubble.  
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To turn Hubble from a national disgrace almost to the great American comeback story.  
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And here it is, still our workhorse camera, going on 15 years.
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It’s gonna be a tough moment when it comes out of the Hubble.  Because I remember exactly the moment it was emplaced in the Hubble.  
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But I really look forward to be able to walk up to it and touch it someday in the Smithsonian.  And say, “That’s the camera that saved Hubble.”
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NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
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