Telescope for Astronomy

Discussion Question 1: For the past 10 – 20 years observational astronomy has been experiencing a somewhat unprecedented golden age of discovery that rivals those of any other science discipline. This was initiated by the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 although the Hubble did not go into operation until the thing was fixed on orbit following a rather unfortunate engineering lapse that ultimately resulted in its primary mirror to be launched into orbit with an incorrect shape. It turns out that this was not because the mirror was ground into a shape that induced errors on its surface but rather the instrument used to measure the shape of the mirror during this process was not correct in its measurements per the telescope’s design. So the mirror was actually ground according to the returns from this calibration instrument which resulted in the mirror being ground into an entirely wrong shape. Oops.