Word: perkins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even though TIGR was spewing out gene sequences at unprecedented rates, Venter was still restless. Then Hunkapiller called from his office at Perkin-Elmer to say that he had a new, faster machine he wanted Venter to see. What Venter saw was the future: a gene-mapping computer 50 times as fast as anything running at TIGR. With one of these machines, the 1,000 scientists who had spent 10 years decoding a yeast genome could have completed their work in one day. Emboldened by the new technology, Venter announced his plans to sequence the human genome rapidly. He founded...
...calculate the apparent distortion of Hubble's mirror. Their work was confirmed by the "fossil record" team, which went back to the source of the flawed mirror, a Connecticut plant now owned by Hughes Danbury Optical Systems. (At the time of the manufacturing mistake, the facility was part of Perkin-Elmer Corp.) Like archaeologists looking for the missing link, the optical sleuths pored over the blueprints and tools used to make the mirror. Eventually, they zeroed in on a complex device called an interferometer, which was used to measure the curve of the mirror's surface. They found that...
...catch the telescope's flaw. Rough grinding of the mirror began in 1978, final polishing was not finished until 1981, and the completed telescope sat on the ground for four years after the space shuttle program was disrupted by the Challenger explosion. The mirror's manufacturer, Connecticut-based Perkin-Elmer Corp.,* told NASA that the standards of precision established for the mirror were not only met but exceeded. The only problem was that the mirror had been painstakingly polished into the wrong shape...
...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...
...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...