The Hubble Wars

by Chaisson, Eric J.

• ISBN13: 9780674412552
• ISBN10: 0674412559
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-04-01
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

The Hubble Space Telescope is the largest, most complex, and most powerful observatory ever deployed in space, designed to allow astronomers to look far back into our own cosmic past with unprecedented clarity. Yet from its launch in 1990, when it was discovered that a flawed mirror was causing severe "myopia" and sending fuzzy images back to Earth, the HST has been at the center of a controversy over who was at fault for the flaw and how it should be fixed. Now Chaisson, a former senior scientist on the HST project, tells the inside story of the much heralded mission to fix the telescope. Drawing on his journals, Chaisson recreates the day-to-day struggles of scientists, politicians, and publicists to fix the telescope and control the political spin. Illustrated with "before and after" full-color pictures from the telescope and updated with a new preface, The Hubble Wars tells an engaging tale of scientific comedy and error.In this new edition, coming at the half-way point in the HST's planned mission of fifteen years, Chaisson has brought the Hubble story up-to-date by sorting out the spectacular from the mundane contributions the HST has made to our knowledge of the Solar System, the Milky Way Galaxy, and the distant galaxies of deep space.

Table of Contents

Preface, 1998	ix	(10)
Preface to the Original Edition	xix
Prologue Launch of Space Telescope	1	(32)
1 Deployment and Early Operations	33	(53)
2 Jitters, in Space and on the Ground	86	(35)
3 Hubble's First Light	121	(28)
4 Babel Revisited	149	(43)
5 Rocky Road to the Imaging Campaign	192	(41)
6 Inaugural Science Observations	233	(60)
7 More Early Science Results	293	(53)
Epilogue Miracle on Orbit	346	(9)
Afterword The "Fix"	355	(14)
For Further Reading	369	(2)
Index	371