Flawed mirror

Within weeks of the launch of the telescope, the images returned showed that there was a serious problem with the optical system. Although the first images appeared to be sharper than ground-based images, the telescope failed to achieve a final sharp focus, and the best image quality obtained was drastically lower than expected. Images of point sources spread out over a radius of more than one arcsecond, instead of having a point spread function concentrated within a circle 0.1 arcsec in diameter as had been specified in the design criteria.The detailed performance is shown in graphs from STScI illustrating the mis-figured PSFs compared to post-correction and ground based PSFs.

Analysis of the flawed images showed that the cause of the problem was that the primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. Although it was probably the most precisely figured mirror ever made, with variations from the prescribed curve of no more than 1/65 of the wavelength of visible light, it was too flat at the edges. The mirror was barely 2.2 micrometres out from the required shape, but the difference was catastrophic, introducing severe spherical aberration, a flaw in which light reflecting off the edge of a mirror focuses on a different point from the light reflecting off its center.

The effect of the mirror flaw on scientific observations depended on the particular observation—the core of the aberrated PSF was sharp enough to permit high-resolution observations of bright objects, and spectroscopy was largely unaffected. However, the loss of light to the large, out of focus halo severely reduced the usefulness of the telescope for faint objects or high contrast imaging. This meant that nearly all of the cosmological programs were essentially impossible since they required observation of exceptionally faint objects.NASA and the telescope became the butt of many jokes, and the project was popularly regarded as a white elephant. (For instance, in the movie The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, the Hubble was pictured with the Titanic, the Hindenburg, and the Edsel). Nonetheless, during the first three years of the Hubble mission, before the optical corrections, the telescope still carried out a large number of productive observations. The error was well characterized and stable, enabling astronomers to optimize the results obtained using sophisticated image processing techniques such as deconvolution.