HUBBLE'S REDEMPTION

摘要

"Hubble is working perfectly, but the universe is blurry," Johnny Carson told his television audience in the summer of 1990. The audience was laughing, but NASA and the astronomers who hoped to use the newly launched Hubble Space Telescope (HST) were not. They had just taken the first photos with what NASA had told the world would be the most powerful telescope in history, only to discover that the primary mirror suffered from spherical aberration. Like a nearsighted man without glasses, it couldn't bring the image into focus.