Mario Livio, Astrophysicist/Space Telescope Science Institute: Ask anybody the name of a
telescope, Hubble is the name that always comes up.
Todd Halvorson, Space Reporter/Florida Today: The public, the general public seems to have a
love affair with Hubble.
Mario Livio, Astrophysicist/Space Telescope Science Institute: I mean, this is the telescope
that everybody recognizes, recognizes the images from this telescope and recognizes its
importance, you know, to literally, you know, everybody's life in the sense of inspiration.
President Barack Obama: And I should point out, by the way, that in my private office just off the
Oval, I've got the picture of Jupiter from the Hubble.
(Music)
Lisa Malone, External Relations Director/Kennedy Space Center: Twenty years after launching
on a space shuttle and opening its instruments to the farthest reaches of space, NASA's Hubble
Space Telescope has become synonymous with exploration, discovery and even a bit of luck.
Mario Livio, Astrophysicist/Space Telescope Science Institute: One of the things that Hubble
has done is it really taught us something about our place in the universe and our role within it. We
want to know, how did the universe start? How did our galaxy start? How did the Earth start? How
did life on Earth start? And we also want to know, how will all of these things end?
George Diller/NASA Public Affairs Officer: When the telescope arrived, there was a lot of
anticipation because there was so much extraordinary effort required at KSC in order to assure that
the telescope was going to be able to maintain in the kind of environment that it had to be. And that
meant a cleanliness standard that was extremely pristine, far beyond anything that we had ever
launched before.
Lisa Malone, External Relations Director/Kennedy Space Center With years of design and
construction behind it, along with months more of processing, the Hubble was sealed inside
Discovery for liftoff. The Hubble Space Telescope flew into the national consciousness on April 24,
1990, inside the payload bay of space shuttle Discovery.
Todd Halvorson, Space Reporter/Florida Today: The launching of the telescope itself was a
huge deal because the Hubble Space Telescope was long-awaited and it was supposed to be
launched in the year that the Challenger accident happened.
Lisa Malone, External Relations Director/Kennedy Space Center: Hubble was different from
land-based observatories because it would operate from a point hundreds of miles above the
distorting effects of Earth's atmosphere. Though its 94-and-a-half-inch mirror is small compared to
those built on the ground, the telescope is huge by spacecraft standards. At more than 43 feet long,
the telescope took up most of the shuttle's payload bay. But as large as Hubble was, it was sent up
with a tiny flaw in its main mirror. It was an imperfection less than the width of a human hair, but it
was enough to blur Hubble's images and leave the observatory's potential in doubt.
Todd Halvorson, Space Reporter/Florida Today: To find out two months after launch that it was
launched with a misshapen mirror was crushing to NASA.
George Diller/NASA Public Affairs Officer: When the telescope had its spherical aberration
needed glasses, we had already built expectations to the point where that they were expecting to
see these kind of things right away. When in fact, even if the telescope had worked, it was going to
take astronomers a considerable amount of time to get some of that data and then to see what else
Hubble was going to find that we didn't know about.
Lisa Malone, External Relations Director/Kennedy Space Center: The telescope was quite
powerful even with the flaw, but NASA knew it would have to fix it. So engineers set out to build
Hubble a set of contact lenses.
George Diller/NASA Public Affairs Officer: So, I think that was our, probably our biggest
challenge was to try to make people realize that these things were still going to happen. We just
needed a little time to fix this problem.
Todd Halvorson, Space Reporter/Florida Today: Being able to restore the Hubble Space
Telescope's observational capabilities was incredibly to the agency and they put together a great
plan to do it.
Lisa Malone, External Relations Director/Kennedy Space Center: Astronauts made five back-
to-back spacewalks during the repair mission, a first. They spent more than 35 hours working on
the telescope in the payload bay. The Hubble repair had effects reaching beyond the telescope's
health, as well.
Todd Halvorson, Space Reporter/Florida Today: This mission wasn't just about restoring the
Hubble Space Telescope, it was about whether NASA had the capability to go off and build the
International Space Station.
George Diller/NASA Public Affairs Officer: The problem was fixed to the extent that it never
occurs to anybody to even think about it anymore because the results are just so dramatic from the Hubble.
Lisa Malone, External Relations Director/Kennedy Space Center: The first images from the
telescope proved the servicing achieved its goal. The space telescope was free to look into the
farthest distances ever seen, nearly as far back as the beginning of the universe. Astronauts made
four more servicing flights to the Hubble Space Telescope to upgrade its instruments and replace
critical components.
George Diller/NASA Public Affairs Officer: We did it in a way that we knew it was the last time
we were ever going to visit the telescope, and we had to do everything to it that we wanted to do if
we wanted it to last a lot longer. So that made it more complex and when the mission was over, the
feeling was, we'd done it.
Todd Halvorson, Space Reporter/Florida Today: They have seen different worlds for the very
first time through the eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope and its really expanded the general
public's view of the universe, how the universe began, what the ultimate fate of the universe is
going to be. It has ignited, it just has ignited the imagination of the collective American public.
Lisa Malone, External Relations Director/Kennedy Space Center: The space telescope repaid
each mission with more incredible views of space that all could see and appreciate. Hubble
observations astounded researchers by showing the universe was not only expanding, it was speeding up.
Mario Livio, Astrophysicist/Space Telescope Science Institute: Imagine your amazement if
when I throw these keys up, you would suddenly see these keys accelerate in toward the ceiling.
This is what we discovered. This was extraordinarily surprising and it led to this notion of dark
energy that is pushing on the universe to accelerate.
George Diller/NASA Public Affairs Officer: Once we began to get things back from Hubble, the
scientists were beginning to see physical processes going on that they didn't really understand, and
hadn't been able to see before.
Lisa Malone, External Relations Director/Kennedy Space Center: Twenty years after opening
a new eye on the universe, Hubble continues to dazzle by reaching farther back in time and space.
George Diller/NASA Public Affairs Officer: The light that we're just now receiving from some of
these galaxies and different objects show younger and younger galaxies and stars, the light from
which, when they left that galaxy, the Earth hadn't even been formed yet. That's how far back in
time Hubble is seeing.
Mario Livio, Astrophysicist/Space Telescope Science Institute: We're talking about questions
that a few tens of years ago we didn't even know to ask.
George Diller/NASA Public Affairs Officer: The whole thing, it's a very storied program from the
very first launch until the last servicing mission.
Lisa Malone, External Relations Director/Kennedy Space Center: There are more questions for
astronomers to answer and Hubble will remain in orbit to answer them for years to come.