Robin Kerrod and the Romance of Astronomy
Author Robin Kerrod is inspired by science, so much so that his new book explores “the extraordinary beauty and aesthetic qualities of the images” produced by the Hubble telescope.
Published August 1, 2004
By William Tucker
Academy Contributor
To celebrate the Hubble telescope’s achievements, Robbin Kerrod has written a coffee-table book, Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe, to bring down to Earth the romance that Hubble has been carrying with the heavens for the past decade and a half. “I don’t think the public at large truly appreciated the extraordinary beauty and aesthetic qualities of the images Hubble has sent back to us,” he says.
Kerrod is particularly pleased that his book has been presented to prominent politicians in Washington and the White House as part of an ever-growing “Save the Hubble” lobby. The campaign is trying to persuade NASA and the government to change their mind about abandoning the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
But then writing books has never been a chore for Kerrod, who has been a full-time author for more than 35 years. He has penned more than 200 titles – for children and adults – on all aspects of science and technology, from Robots (1984) and Whales and Dolphins (1998) to The Way the Universe Works (2002). “I’ve always loved writing,” he says. “There’s a seemingly endless source of inspiration in the sciences. There’s always something exciting going on somewhere.”
Hubble No Longer Sees Double
At its outset, Hubble came close to being one of the biggest scientific flops in history. Originally proposed in 1946 by American astronomer Lyman Spitzer, the space telescope was funded in 1979, and scheduled for launch in the mid-1980s. Then came the 1986 Challenger disaster. Lift-off was moved back and didn’t occur until April 24, 1990.
The 12-ton, 43-foot long satellite houses an 8-foot-diameter parabolic mirror made of silica-titanium oxide glass that took two years to polish to the proper looking-glass quality. Four main instruments (all since replaced) produced images and analyzed the light:
– The Wide-Field and Planetary Camera was designed to look at large swathes of sky, bringing images into sharp focus; The Faint Object Camera was so sensitive that it needed filters to look at anything brighter than magnitude 21. (Stars of magnitude greater than 6 are already too faint for the naked eye, and the best Earth-bound telescopes can see out to magnitude 24.)
– The High-Speed Photometer measured fluctuations of light sources from high-energy objects, from supernova remnants to ordinary stars.
– The Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph spread out light waves in order to detect the telltale dark bands that indicate the elements in the stars.
Within hours, however, things began to go wrong. Discovery Space Shuttle crew member Steven Hawley sent the instructions to unfurl the telescope’s two panels that gather solar energy. One of them stuck. A space walk by astronauts Kathy Sullivan and Bruce McCandless freed the frozen panel, but it would later vibrate each time the fast-moving satellite passed between light and dark (16 times a day), blurring many of Hubble’s images.
The Correction Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement
Worse was yet to come. A month later, when Hubble’s first images were relayed back to Earth, they were unaccountably blurred. Something was obviously wrong. Not until a year later was it determined that someone had made the simple mistake of failing to convert English to metric measurements in manufacturing the mirror.
The aberration – only two microns, 1/50th the width of a human hair – was still enough to make Hubble lose focus. “Pix nixed as Hubble sees double!” said one headline.
In 1993, NASA engineered a rescue mission. COSTAR (Correction Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement), an ingenious device fitted with ten small mirrors, corrected Hubble’s vision just like a pair of spectacles. In order to make room, however, the High-Speed Photometer had to be removed. Both solar panels were replaced, along with six failed gyroscopes and two nonworking memory banks.
Finally, after three years and 35 hours of space walking, Hubble was sending back breathtaking images of the wonders of the Universe. The pictures are in the public domain and Kerrod has assembled them in an exquisite collection – probably the best summation of Hubble’s work ever made.
Also read: Going Deep with the Hubble Space Telescope
