Hubble, NASA’s Comeback Kid, Survives to See a New Dawn article

This article is about the Hubble telescope is having problems and will be repaired soon. The telescope took decades to plan and build, and when they finally got it into orbit in the early 1990's, it could only get blurry pictures of space. It turns out that one of the mirrors used to focus light was ground down to the wrong degree. Luckily, they were able to put a corrective lense inside of it to fix the problem.

Over the years, Hubble has been able to get pictures of distant galaxies that no telescope on Earth could get. The picture from Earth telescopes were blurred and distorted by the atmosphere. That is the main advantage of having the telescope in space.

Since the Hubble space telescope has been in space for so long, there are different things going wrong with it. One thing is that is broken is some of the gyroscopes that are used to orient it correctly. These things, along with other fixes, will be administered in Spring 2008.

Gyroscopes deal a lot with physics. In the center of a gyroscope, there is a spinning disk. The spinning of the disk keeps the gyroscope oriented in the same direction all the time because of the rotational forces provided by the disk. Imagine you are on a merry-go-round at the playground. When it spins, you get pulled outward. A similar thing happens to the disk. The outward pull only has a force pulling out parallel to the disk. This force is enough to keep the disk oriented the same way constantly.