Richard Isakson wrote:
"Morgans" wrote ...

I'm not as up with all of the satelite stuff, but am interested.
What is
the HST optics, and what does that have to do with Hubble, and a
black
project, right in front of our eyes?

Jim

HST means Hubble Space Telescope. After the one point five billion
dollar
Hubble was launched it was discovered that that it couldn't see the
stars
very well. An investigation discovered that the wrong mirror had
been built
into the spacecraft. Like they've got large mirrors laying around
everywhere and this was a simple mistake. Oops. Or was it a
mistake?

No, they did not put the wrong mirror into the Space Telescope
(It wasn't named for Hubble until after launch). During
figuring and testing of the primary mirror one of the optical
elements in the test aparatus was installed backwards. This
introduced spherical aberration into the test aparatus, and so
the primary mirror was figured to remove that same amount of
spherical aberration from the ensemble, which means the
primary was figured WITH spherical aberration that
compensated for that in the test aparatus.


The
company that made the mirror also made mirrors for US spy satellites.
Could
it be "the wrong mirror" was installed on purpose so that the hubble
became
a replacement spy satellite?

No. PE (or whoever it was) got the contract in part because of
their expertise in making large mirrors for spy satellites.
However the people who were experienced in that work were not
allowed to work on teh Space Telescope mirror so it was made
by less experienced people.

Kodak won the contract to make a second set of optics,
a back up set to be used if something happened to the
set being made by the primary contractor. AFAAK, Kodak
did a good job.

That second set has supposedly disappeared and the rumor is
it was used in an KH-12, the issue was moot by then as
it was certainly never possible to replace the primary
mirror in the HST on-orbit.

Unless Kodak screwed up and the mirros were switched so that
it IS the Kodak mirror that is in the HST AND NASA
decided to just use the mirror known to be defective
instead of having it refigured.

OR, I suppose, unless PE was working on a KH-12
mirror at the same time and again, switched them
and didn't bother to fix the bad optics.

Remember, the optical elements were fully completed at
the contractor facility and then shipped to NASA for
assembly into the ST. It's not like the whole telescope
was made at PE and then inserted into a satellite.

Prior to assembly of the Space Telescope, re-figuring
of the primary mirror would not have been a major task.
After assembly, swapping mirrors was not feasible.

So the "mirrors were swapped" theories are a non-starter.
Not a problem for the run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorist.

--

FF