April 25,1990: Flawed Hubble Deployed

摘要

Unbound by Earth's atmospheric distortion, the Hubble Space Telescope was deployed into low Earth orbit with the promise of delivering unprecedented clarity of the universe. But a design flaw in the multibillion-dollar observatory's primary mirror dampened that promise. Hubble, a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), was carried into space by the Space Shuttle Discov-ery, which launched from Kennedy Space Center, Fla., April 24,1990.