[Magdalen] Hubble's vision blurred ! ! !

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

I was watching a science program and they were interviewing one of the guys
who had made Hubble, the space telescope.  The shuttle had launched Hubble,
it was operating autonomously, and a few pictures came back blurry. This
guy said he was confident that it was just a calibration thing, and they
could just tweak the software and everything would be fine.  He went off
for a vacation in Europe.
He returned, and as he was getting off the plane, his cell phone went off.
It was his supervisor.
"Do you know what the term 'spherical aberration' means?"
He immediately realized what he was referring to, and then immediately
assumed it was a joke.  After a while, his supervisor said, "Pick up any
paper and tell me what the headlines say!"
He picked up a paper, saw exactly that in the headlines.  Then, he thought
for a moment.

"Oh...  You're GOOD!!!  but how could you possibly know I was going to be
at this particular stand so you could plant the fake newspaper here?"

Denial is soooo much more fun than admitting that you have F'd up a
multi-billion dollar scientific instrument.

In the interview, he was laughing, because it all worked out (tbtg, as some
might say). They eventually figured out that they could utilize special
software to precisely cancel out the minuscule error in the lense grinding
(millionths of an inch), and as we now all know, Hubble was able to do some
mind-blowingly marvelous, wonderful, fantastic work.




James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy