Video: Hubble's Tinkertoy solution
Thursday, September 24, 2015 - 06:30
in Astronomy & Space
In April 1990, workers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, were packing up a very special shipment to be delivered via Space Shuttle to low-Earth orbit - the Hubble Space Telescope. One helpful engineer noticed there was a cable loop that seemed to be too close to the dish of one of the two high-gain antennas, the telescope's primary means of communication. Thinking it might impair the antenna's deployment, he twisted the cable a few inches out of the way, unknowingly altering the operational configuration.