_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [113]
No longer was Cocoa Beach the quaint little seaside village with its main beachside drive lined with swaying Australian pines. No longer were the easygoing villagers enjoying the slow pace of Florida living. It had become what many had predicted, another Fort Lauderdale, lined with one condominium after the other. There were now twenty times the number of people stacked on every inch of its once pristine sand.
Jo and I looked at each other and nodded. It was time, definitely time to move to Merritt Island—an island bordered on its east side by the Banana River lagoon and on its west side by the Indian River estuary, an island separating the beaches from Florida’s mainland where lowlying hills on its southern tip host Honeymoon Lake, a body of water dug by mound-building natives four thousand years ago, a tropical winter sanctuary today for geese and ducks from the north, and an equal sanctuary from greenback-laden tourists.
We managed to secure a piece of the lake’s north shore, and my wife began drawing up plans. By the time it was time for the most important Space Shuttle mission of the 1990s, the launch of the massive Hubble space telescope, we had moved into our new island home.
Hubble was set free in Earth orbit by the crew aboard Discovery and was hailed as the most advanced telescope ever built for astronomy.
The massive observatory, the size of a city bus, was a dream started in 1946 by Princeton astronomer Lyman Spitzer. Spitzer had urged our government to build an orbiting space platform with revolutionary instruments to probe the universe. No matter how powerful the astronomical telescopes on Earth were, they would never see clearly through the planet’s thick and pollution-muddied atmosphere. A telescope orbiting above Earth’s atmosphere could survey the heavens with unmatched clarity.
But once in orbit, Hubble was sidetracked by flawed vision. Two months after its fiery ascent from Cape Canaveral in April 1990, embarrassed astronomers admitted Hubble’s goals were seriously compromised. Some systems worked well, but not the telescope’s ability to see deep into the universe—back to near the beginning of time.
The most celebrated telescope since Galileo assembled his first optical instrument was sending Earth blurred images. Hubble’s primary mirror worked dismally; the observatory electronics sent back pictures that were fuzzier than snapshots taken by the unsteady hands of a child. The precious eight-foot primary mirror, which it had taken five years to grind and polish to supposed perfection, was flawed.
The mirror was ten-thousandths of an inch too flat.
That sounds insignificant. It is only one-fiftieth of the diameter of a human hair, which means it’s invisible to the human eye. But in the optical world of mirrors and lenses built to see twelve billion light years across the universe, that amount of error was enormous. So Hubble became instant grist for late-night television comedians and a butt of ridicule for American science.
In Arizona State University’s astronomy program, scientists were hard at work to come up with a fix for the myopic observatory. The result was COSTAR (corrective optics space telescope axial replacement), a box the size of a telephone booth. On Earth, it weighed 650 pounds, and it contained ten mortised mirrors. It was about as close to technical magic as astronomers and engineers could get. Each of its ten mirrors was no larger than a man’s thumbnail!
The plan was for spacewalking astronauts to fly a Space Shuttle to an orbiting rendezvous with the massive telescope, grasp Hubble tightly with the Shuttle’s robotic arm, and move the large observatory to within their reach in the Shuttle’s cargo bay. There the spacewalkers would begin their “save the Hubble” week in space.
Among their repairs, the spacewalkers would slide COSTAR in place within the main structure, where the mirrors would shorten the beam of light images captured by the flawed edges of the primary mirror. By shortening