Word: mirrorized
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Most Disappointing Peek Through a Looking Glass If you get the wrong prescription at the local vision center, you can just go back and have it changed. Not so for NASA, whose incorrect prescription is spinning around the earth in the Hubble Space Telescope. Because a mirror was ground to the wrong shape, the space agency was saddled with a $1.5 billion instrument that performs far below expectations...
...first Godfather films sketched a history of the Mafia as a cracked- mirror reflection of American industry. One hoped G3 might pit the Corleones against the bad boys of the drug trade: the old Italians vs. blacks and Hispanics, rustic chivalry vs. cutthroat capitalism. Instead, Coppola, who wrote the screenplay with Puzo, sends Michael on a side trip to Rome and Sicily...
...person called never spoke first. To take our telephones into more soundproof rooms, we extended phone lines with lamp wire. At safer hours we slipped up and down corridors to meet together in different apartments. On the hall floor outside my apartment, I positioned a piece of broken mirror against the wall so that the entire length of the corridor was visible from my partly open door. It was a group rule that everyone checked the mirror before stepping into the hall. When we made visits, knocks on the door required still another code...
...achieve the exacting specifications for the mirror, Perkin-Elmer used an optics template, a tubular array of smaller mirrors and lenses linked by connecting rods, to guide the grinding and polishing processes. When the Allen committee tested this template assembly, it found that there was a critical error of 1.3 mm (0.05 in.) in the placement of the template's components. The Hubble mirror was carefully fashioned to match exactly this error in the template...
What was worse, the company's reliance on this system was absolute. Though backup analyses pointed to a major flaw in the mirror, stated the report, these "indicators of error were discounted at the time as being themselves flawed." The evidence of the problem was never analyzed in detail by the engineers and scientists most qualified to do so. NASA accepted Perkin-Elmer's decision to rely solely on the precision of the template, when instead the space agency should have been alert "to the fragility of the process and the possibility of gross error...