
The Hubble Wars
Astrophysics Meets Astropolitics in the Two-Billion-Dollar Struggle over the Hubble Space Telescope, With a New Preface
Eric J. Chaisson(Author)
Harvard University Press
Published on 3. May 1998
Book
Paperback/Softback
424 pages
978-0-674-41255-2 (ISBN)
Description
The Hubble Space Telescope is the largest, most complex, and most powerful observatory ever deployed in space, designed to allow astronomers to look far back into our own cosmic past with unprecedented clarity. Yet from its launch in 1990, when it was discovered that a flawed mirror was causing severe "myopia" and sending fuzzy images back to Earth, the HST has been at the center of a controversy over who was at fault for the flaw and how it should be fixed. Now Eric Chaisson, a former senior scientist on the HST project, tells the inside story of the much heralded mission to fix the telescope. Drawing on his journals, Chaisson recreates the day-to-day struggles of scientists, politicians, and publicists to fix the telescope and control the political spin. Illustrated with "before and after" full-color pictures from the telescope and updated with a new preface, The Hubble Wars tells an engaging tale of scientific comedy and error.
In this new edition, coming at the half-way point in the HST's planned mission of fifteen years, Chaisson has brought the Hubble story up-to-date by sorting out the spectacular from the mundane contributions the HST has made to our knowledge of the Solar System, the Milky Way Galaxy, and the distant galaxies of deep space.
In this new edition, coming at the half-way point in the HST's planned mission of fifteen years, Chaisson has brought the Hubble story up-to-date by sorting out the spectacular from the mundane contributions the HST has made to our knowledge of the Solar System, the Milky Way Galaxy, and the distant galaxies of deep space.
Reviews / Votes
[A]n absorbing personal history of the Hubble project... The Hubble Wars is a technological thriller, contentious expose, and popularized science. It may be the most readable and instructive book on the doing of science since James Watson wrote The Double Helix. -- Chet Raymo * New York Times Book Review * There are many interesting nuggets in the book and much of it is good reading. -- Bob Dryden * Astronomy Now * This book recounts the inside story of how the mission to fix the telescope was undertaken, recreating the day-to-day problems of scientists and others involved as they determined how to fix the telescope as well as controlling the political aspects with 'damage-limitation' actions. This second edition, which comes at the halfway point in the HST's planned mission of 15 years, now brings the Hubble story up to date by sorting out the spectacular from the mundane contributions it has made to our knowledge of the Solar System, the Milky Way and the distant galaxies over that period. * Spaceflight *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
18-page color insert; 112 halftones; 11 line illustrations; 9 graphs
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
617 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-674-41255-2 (9780674412552)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Eric J. Chaisson is a Research Associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is the author of Cosmic Dawn, nominated for the National Book Award for distinguished science writing.
Content
Prologue - launch of space telescope; deployment and early operations; jitters, in space and on the ground; "Hubble"'s first light; Babel revisited; rocky road to the imaging campaign; inaugral science observations; more early science results; epilogue - miracle on orbit; afterword - the "Fix".