Word: perkins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Hubble Space Telescope's devolution from Wonder of the Age to Blunder of the Century continued without letup last week. For one thing, the Associated Press reported that Perkin-Elmer Corp., which built the flawed mirror on the telescope, gave a subcontractor backward drawings for part of the telescope's guidance system -- forcing the prime contractor to pay the San Diego-based subcontractor, Composite Optics Inc., to rebuild it. Composite Optics reportedly made a tidy 63% profit...
...another, Tennessee Democratic Senator Albert Gore Jr. told his Commerce Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space that Perkin-Elmer shrugged off a test that might have exposed flaws in the Hubble's mirrors while they were still on earth. Apparently, Gore said, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was persuaded that a so-called end-to-end, or full-assembly, test (not provided for in the winning bid) was unnecessary. Some NASA officials have argued that the test was not needed for technical reasons. Others claim it would have added hundreds of millions to the $1.5 billion price...