
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, June 28, 1990                   TAG: 9006280245
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

HUBBLE CAN'T SEE CLEARLY

At least one of the two mirrors in the $1.6 billion Hubble Space Telescope was built in the wrong shape and will not work properly, NASA officials said Wednesday. The defect will virtually eliminate the use of a key camera and halt about half of all the telescope's planned scientific work until a shuttle crew can go back to the telescope and make repairs in 1993.

NASA has ordered an investigation to find out who made the mistake. Disappointed scientists and engineers are scrambling for ways to minimize the impact of the problem on the orbiting observatory, which has cost taxpayers $2.6 billion.

Jean Olivier, deputy project manager for the telescope, said, "Somewhere in this complicated chain of events, there was a mistake made" in one of the two mirrors. "It was done carefully and it was done to the wrong figure," or curvature.

The flaw gives the Hubble a serious case of blurred vision. Two onboard cameras - the workhorse Wide Field and Planetary Camera, and the European-built Faint Objects Camera, designed to take pictures in visible light - are the most seriously affected.

A second generation of instruments was already being built for the Hubble and engineers say they can be outfitted with the equivalent of prescription glasses to compensate for the defect, just as glasses correct nearsightedness, said NASA's chief Hubble astronomer, Ed Weiler. Hubble's "glasses" will be adjustments in the shapes of small mirrors used to route its light rays into cameras.

Those instruments are scheduled to be installed on shuttle missions now scheduled for 1993, 1996 and 1997. Officials said they are looking into advancing the schedule.

"We are not losing science," Weiler said. "We are deferring science."

In addition, officials at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore are searching the backlog of scientists' proposals for experiments that can replace those already approved but which now must wait for the new instruments to be launched. Ten times as many proposals were submitted as could be accommodated in the first round of research, officials said, and many of them could use the telescope as is.

For the short term, Weiler said, "the important question is, `Can we still do unique and important science?' The answer is an emphatic yes."

But he acknowledged that Hubble scientists, many of whom have spent 12 or more years developing instruments for the project, are frustrated and unhappy.

by CNB