And now, finally, it was time to start erasing the frustrations of Hubble’s early years.Įxcept that staring at nothing and coming up empty didn’t seem like the best way to do that.īut Williams was undeterred. After the fix, the previously blind eye in the sky could finally see stars as more than blurred points of light. Not much earlier, astronauts had dragged Hubble into the cargo bay of the space shuttle Endeavour and corrected a disastrous flaw in the prized telescope’s vision. Perceptions of the project, which had already cost multiple billions of dollars, were pretty dismal. Plus, another Hubble failure would be a public relations nightmare. People would kill for that amount of time with the sharpest tool in the shed, they said, and besides - no way would the distant galaxies Williams hoped to see be bright enough for Hubble to detect.
It was a terrible idea, his colleagues told him, and a waste of valuable telescope time.
He is often credited as the man who confirmed the Universe is expanding, a finding that was announced in 1929.In 1995, astronomer Bob Williams wanted to point the Hubble Space Telescope at a patch of sky filled with absolutely nothing remarkable. The telescope is named in honour of Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), an astronomer who discovered many galaxies beyond our own using a telescope in California in the 1920s. Who was the Hubble Space Telescope named after?
But despite all its amazing discoveries, you may have several questions about this technological marvel.