The Hubble Space Telescope Launched 30 Years Ago

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

The Hubble Space Telescope launched 30 years ago:

The mission was novel from the beginning, with a planned orbit at 612km above the planet's surface requiring the vehicle to fly higher than any shuttle mission to date. Telescope deployment came a day after the shuttle reached orbit and involved a complicated sequence of events. After disconnecting the telescope from the shuttle's power supply, astronauts would use a robotic arm to move the instrument from the shuttle's payload bay, open its solar arrays, and finally release the telescope.

"From the time we disconnected Hubble from the shuttle's power, we had two clocks running," explained Bill Reeves, who was the mission's flight director and supervised operations from Johnson Space Center. "The telescope was on battery power from that moment, and there was a limited supply. And with the telescope attached to the arm, the shuttle had to be on free drift, as thruster firings might damage the instrument."

When ground controllers commanded the telescope to begin unfurling its two solar arrays, one of the arrays did not do so properly. Minutes turned into hours as engineers on the ground troubleshot the problem.

[...] As Reeves contemplated whether to give [an] egress order, engineers said they thought they had identified a problem with the software that monitored tension in the solar array. Making a small change, they proposed, would fix the problem. This worked, and the second solar array unfurled beside its companion.

[...] For a while, [STS-31 pilot Charlie] Bolden recalls being on top of the world after landing. Like everyone else, the astronauts eagerly awaited the first image from the telescope, a shot of a distant star named HD96755 captured on May 20, 1990. Their elation was crushed when the first picture turned out to be blurry and only marginally better than ground-based telescopes. Soon, astronomers realized the telescope had a warped mirror.

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