Many of the discoveries made by the Hubble are taken for granted today, but the space telescope’s numerous significant accomplishments have made it one of the most important observatories in history. Since then, the HST has had four more service calls to repair and update it, with the last taking place in May 2009 by the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis mission STS-125. Just a few weeks later, NASA declared the Hubble’s repair mission a complete success and backed up its claim by showing off the first of many much sharper Hubble images. Hubble’s “glasses” – actually called the COSTAR corrective optics package – were installed by Space Shuttle Endeavour mission STS-61 crew members in December 1993. Hubble's final service call - STS-125 Mission Specialist Michael Good, May 2009 (Photo: NASA) So they then decided to build the space telescope a set of “spectacles” to correct its ocular difficulties. The team ruled out bringing Hubble back to Earth and fixing it here because it would be too expensive and time-consuming. Since the Hubble mission was designed to allow it to be serviced and updated regularly throughout its operation, scientists and technicians immediately began work on a solution to fix the HST’s “vision problem”. Many of the project’s critics considered Hubble to be an embarrassing flop.īut what the public failed to realize then was, despite the focus on its initial fuzzy images, the Hubble was still able to carry out a number of successful, productive observations. One of the most important lessons from the Galileo affair has been: Believe in science! To bet against science when human life is at stake is insane.Hubble being put into orbit by the Space Shuttle Discovery, April 1990 (Photo: NASA)Īfter analyzing the flawed images, Hubble’s technical staff realized the cause of the problem was that the primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape, despite the extreme measures taken to make it the most precisely configured mirror ever made up until then.Īfter the blurred images became public, NASA and the telescope itself became the targets of harsh criticism and the butt of many jokes. There is no question that the initial dismissive response of the administration to the scientists' warnings concerning the coronavirus has had disastrous consequences…. In an email interview with America, Livio was as frank as I believe Galileo would have been. Livio points out policies that encourage the teaching of a thinly veiled creationism as ‘intelligent design,’ to steer students’ minds away from Darwin’s theory of evolution, and he sees President Trump’s continued promotion of fossil fuels as “nothing short of shocking.”ĭisputes about the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic offer another parallel. In comparing the culture that condemned Galileo to our own, Livio writes that the mindset that leads to nonscientific decrees (like the decree of the Vatican’s Holy Congregation for the Index in 1616 against Copernicanism) also prevails in the United States to this day. In 1633, during an outbreak of the plague, Galileo was “pronounced a suspected heretic, forced to recant his Copernican ideas, and eventually placed under house arrest.” He died nine years later in Florence. But after his publication of the Dialog o, which, among other things, promoted Copernicanism, Galileo found his support from Pope Urban VIII withdrawn. In comparing the culture that condemned Galileo to our own, Livio writes that the mindset that leads to nonscientific decrees also prevails in the United States to this day.įor a time, he enjoyed the support of many Copernican scientists, priests and cardinals, and even the pope. He was also a great proponent of Copernicus’s idea that the Sun was the center of the solar system, not the Earth, which caused him great difficulty with other scientists and the Catholic Church, which believed in a geocentric system. Galileo brought a sense of order to the cosmos. His observations about falling objects contributed to Newton’s and Einstein’s ideas about gravity. Galileo’s telescope, he notes, was the multi-great-grandfather of the Hubble Space T elescope. Livio describes Galileo’s early family life and his interest in music and the arts and depicts Galileo as a genius and the father of modern astronomy and astrophysics. His writing in Galileo is straightforward and conversational, and he is at home in storytelling mode, especially when he relates some of Galileo’s exuberant disagreements with other scientists and some Jesuit mathematicians and astronomers. Livio, an astrophysicist, is able to portray science in a way that laypersons can understand. Galileo and the Science Deniers by Marco Livio
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |