March 4th, 2016, NASA releases a historic
image, one that many believed was impossible. This red dot is an entire galaxy whose light
took 13.4 billion years to reach us. It is a photograph of our universe in its
infancy, a mere three percent of its current age. All of a sudden now, you have a ringside seat
to watch the entire universe evolve and change in front of you. All of that is down to the Hubble space telescope. What could this mysterious red galaxy reveal
about the origins of the cosmos? That story begins when the Hubble telescope
is still on the drawing board. Hubble was meant to solve a problem, cause
people were trying to use ground-based telescopes to measure how fast the expansion of the universe
was. And that means a factor of uncertainty in
the age of the universe. How and when did our universe begin? Solving that mystery would be an historic
success at a time when the space program needs it most. In 1986, the nation is in mourning after the
loss of seven crew members aboard the space shuttle Challenger. This is truly a national loss. The members of the Challenger crew were pioneers. We'll continue our quest in space, the future
doesn't belong to the faint hearted. It belongs to the brave. They needed something to get back into the
game, and Hubble was sort of that big shining star. This was a big space telescope and we're gonna
put this thing into orbit, and it's going to look at black holes. It's gonna figure out where the universe came
from. It's going to revolutionize astronomy. In charge of this daunting mission is Charlie
Pellerin. The primary role of Hubble was to fix things
after Challenger. To show we could still do hard things. I kept reminding myself of John Kennedy when
he said, "We choose to go to the moon. Not because it's easy, because it's hard." We choose to do Hubble because it's hard,
and it was damned hard. Hubble will far surpass all ground-based telescopes
for one simple reason. Earth's atmosphere. If you look up at the night sky, the stars
are gonna appear like they're twinkling, but the star is not changing. What's happening is the, the same kind of
irregulars in the atmosphere that you encounter when you get turbulence in an airplane, it's
all over the place. Now, the solution to that is to put a telescope
above the atmosphere. But unlike ground telescopes, Hubble would
be orbiting the earth at an astonishing speed of almost five miles per second. And that's a problem. Now of course, the Hubble is this thing in
space, moving thousands and thousands of miles an hour in orbit, and which means its natural
tendency is that it's going to be tumbling end over end. It's doing everything but holding still. If you wanna take a snapshot that's clear,
you know you have to hold your camera very steadily. If you shake your camera, you get a fuzzy
picture. Same issue with Hubble. The team must find a way to stabilize Hubble
perfectly. The solution is a gyroscope. Like a top, a gyroscope maintains stability
by spinning quickly on one axis. The team will equip Hubble with six of the
most finely balanced gyroscopes ever constructed, each with a wheel spinning 320 times per second. But even the tiniest imprecision in the gyroscopes
will smear Hubble's images. So, if you ask me before the launch is Hubble
gonna work, and people did, I would say, "Of course it's gonna work, cause there's no other
answer." What would you say? Would, would you say after you spent almost
$2 billion and 15 years, would you say, "Hell, I don't know?" Or would you say, "Let's hope so." What would you say? There's only one answer. "Of course, it's gonna work." Let’s go for auto sequence... And lift off of the space shuttle Discovery
with the Hubble space telescope. Our window on the universe. Okay, we have a go for release and we're gonna
be a minute late. OK Charlie. Telescope's released. OK thank you. So, the telescope's up, Hubble's working. It's deployed into space, and the shuttle
comes home. Feeling pretty, pretty, really pretty good
right now. The flight systems are all working extremely
well. Almost everything we agonized and worried
about has done a great job for us. I think that today everything is going exactly
as we would have hoped. But if we... We had an event about two months later where
we're gonna look at what's called first light. Charlie is with Chief Engineer Gene Oliver
when the first images arrive. And I said, "Gene, wait a minute, wait a minute. That's a fuzzy spot OK?" He said, "Huh, don't worry." I said, "What do you mean, don't worry?" He said, "Well, if it's out of focus, we drive
the stepping motor in this direction until it's in perfect focus, so no big deal." Charlie becomes convinced all that's needed
is a technical adjustment. He leaves for a trip overseas. When he returns, he calls his boss to check
in. So, he comes on the phone and says, "Charlie,
where are you?" I say, "I'm in the red-carpet lounge in St
Louis airport." And he says to me, "What do you know about
sphere collaboration?" And I said, "Well all I know is that when
people, amateurs typically, make a telescope mirror by hand, and they do it sloppily, then
the telescope's useless." He said, "Well I'm glad you know that, because
you launched Hubble space telescope with a spherically aberrated mirror." I said, "Did not." And he said, "Did so." This is two PhD’s, right? And he says, "Go find the front page of any
national newspaper and bring it back and read it to me." So, I come back and above the fold, "National
disaster. Hubble launched with flawed mirror." And he says, "Now what do you say?" And I said, "You guys are good. How did you get a fake newspaper into this
very lounge that I'm landing in?" The headline is no fake. Charlie has launched Hubble with a fatal flaw
and not the one he had feared. Yesterday NASA admitted that its multi-billion-dollar
eye in the sky has developed blurry vision. We had failed in the most visible possible
thing we'd done in many many years. I'd have to say it was like a family member
died. It was like that. I mean, it really was. The observatory will not be sending back the
spectacular pictures that NASA had promised. The reason is that the mirrors are not focusing
light properly. To achieve focus, a telescope's mirror must
be perfectly curved so that its reflected light converges at a single point. After so much worrying about Hubble's ability
to stabilize itself, Charlie's team made an amateur mistake. Hubble uses a mirror. It's two and a half meters across, eight feet. And it focuses the light to a very very specific
focus. And if it's off by even a little bit, the
light won't come to a focus. The problem with Hubble is that it wasn't
the right shape. I believe that the edge of the mirror, the
whole error was like a 50th of a human hair. No human could ever look at that mirror and
suspect there's a problem. We had so many safeguards and I'll look at
this, and I just go, "My word." Boy, we were in so much trouble and didn't
know it. What, what, what a tragedy. Basically, without some novel technical answer,
we're screwed. NASA is embarrassed, while across the country
Charlie and his team are mocked. There was also so much in the media, Hubble
was the butt of so many jokes. People were saying, "Well how did we spend
almost $2 billion and come up with this?" I tried to avoid the news as much as I could
but it, it was impossible. It was even in the New York Times, Washington
Post. It had crying breaking out, and astronomers
were crying everywhere. One of my most senior people is drunk at his
desk. When I realised what had happened, I didn't
believe my personal reputation was in danger. I believed it was ruined. I mean, it was gone. I mean, for this, this level of failure. Arguably the biggest screw up in the history
of science, and I was the leader of the team, so yeah, it was bad. But Charlie is determined to find a solution. I'm not waiting a minute longer than I have
to, to get this telescope fixed. I didn't know how to do it. I had no idea if it even was possible yet. After months of searching, his team thinks
they might have an answer. If the mirror was simply poorly ground to
a very sloppy weight, it'd be hopeless. But the mirror was perfect, just ground to
the wrong prescription. When we humans have vision problems, we correct
that problem by wearing eye glasses, which then are correcting the direction of the light
and make sure that it is focusing properly. That is basically what the Hubble needed. These glasses would come in the form of a
machine called Costar. Costar contains five pairs of small mirrors
on motorized arms. These mirrors correct the light beam entering
the telescope. Finally, you sorta go, "My word, we can fix
this thing." But with Hubble already in space, this repair
won't come easy. Kathryn Thornton and her fellow astronauts
must risk their own safety to save Hubble from disaster. A lot of things can go wrong when you're on
a spacewalk, but most people when they leave the airlock are not so much afraid that something's
gonna happen to them, they're afraid they're gonna mess up. That's, that's, sure your biggest concern
is that, is that our mission was so critical and it was critical that they be done right. Hubble's science instruments are contained
in four bays. Kathryn must replace one instrument called
a high-speed photometer, with Costar. Once installed, the corrective mirrors can
deploy. I mean, remember, this is a huge instrument
the size of a bus. Nothing like that has ever been done before,
and it represents a huge number of technological challenges. But Thornton is far from certain that everything
will go according to plan. And I would have bet money that when we were
putting these instruments in Hubble, we would have run into some problem that we weren't
expecting. I tell you, I'm gonna slip over, you got another
set to keep coming up. Costar is a great big silver box the, the
size of a phone booth, and I would have bet that things wouldn't fit. And we're gonna slide this thing in and it's
gonna get halfway in, and it's gonna go kerthunk. And, and hit something. And as bad as it was, we could always make
it worse. We could have killed it, we could have killed
it. This is opening the door for Costar. I'm on the end of the mechanical arm, and
I can recognize that from this picture because I can see the broken red stripes around my
thighs there. I haven't seen some of this in a long time. This is nice, I like this. We had a lot of eyes watching us. We had everybody on the ground watching, we
had everybody in the crew module watching us. You know, don't, don't hurt it, don't hurt
it, don't hurt it. And it's all up to you. Don't screw this up. Costar is, is a pretty big instrument. It weighs several hundred pounds, maybe 700
pounds on earth, and I can move it with just my fingertips. As Costar slides into place, Thornton can
only hope that everything will fit. And it just slid right in. I could feel it hit a stop, but that was a
bit of a relief. The nightmare I'd had didn't happen. But they couldn't calibrate it until after
we were long gone, and so we had no idea that our mission was successful, even after we
landed. All anyone can do is wait for the pictures. 11 days later, the calibrations are complete. You know, this was what was happening in December
of 1993, everybody gathering around the monitors and, and looking at the first images taken
by Hubble space telescope. And they were gorgeous. I'm sitting there with tears running down
my face looking at this stuff. And everybody's spellbound. I had no clue that the images would be as
powerful as they are. I never imagined something like this. This is, this is astounding. It's got to be astounding to anybody. But these are more than beautiful images. Each pixel helps unlock another scientific
mystery. Cause people was trying to use ground-based
telescopes to measure the expansion of the universe, and that means uncertainty in the
age of the universe. But by looking deeper and deeper, it's looking
farther and farther back in time, and it's measuring the expansion of the universe so
we can tell precisely when the universe formed, you know, 13.7 billion years ago. Hubble has solved, you know, the, one of the
biggest mysteries in astronomy and in science. With each image, the discoveries keep coming. The Hubble space telescope makes me feel like
a kid in a candy store. There, there is no way you're going to be
able to sample and taste everything that you want to. It just, it amazes me the power of something
where you are guaranteed to discover something new about the universe. The universe is a pretty big place. So, you need a telescope that can see very
very far away to even start to get a handle on how the universe is changing over time,
when it began. In the case of the Hubble space telescope,
the Hubble space telescope has the power to see on the order of, of, you know, 11 billion
light years away. And that means you're seeing things as they
were 11 billion years ago. All of a sudden now, you have a ringside seat
to watch the entire universe evolve and change in front of you. You can see how fast things were expanding,
how that whole process worked. And so, for the first time we knew that the
universe really is about 13.8 billion years, we know how fast it expanded. There are very few times in history where
you can just take new technology and discover something new, guaranteed. You know, in the case of the Hubble space
telescope, you could point it somewhere random, and you would see stars and galaxies, and
objects out there that had never been seen before. How many galaxies are out there? This was something that we wondered. There were theories about. But the Hubble space telescope really showed
us how many galaxies there are. Hubble actually looked at a blank part of
the sky, a part of the sky that we didn't think anything was there, and it stared at
that place for a month. And believe me, this was controversial. Use a month of valuable Hubble time to look
at nothing? But instead, pixel by pixel, photon by photon,
Hubble teased out thousands of galaxies. Everywhere in the sky, every tiny point you
look, is covered with galaxies. They've been invisible to us before, but they
were there all along, and we are surrounded by them in the hundreds of billions. In every direction we look. They pointed Hubble at a place in the sky
where there was nothing, and there are like 1500 galaxies in that photo. 1500 galaxies? You know, our Milky Way is just one tiny little
galaxy. We now know that there are more stars in the
universe than grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. But Hubble is also a time machine. You see, there's this wonderful look back
effect, where the farther out in space you look, it took light a long time to get to
you. And now you look at these images, and you'll
effectively look back almost to the beginning of time, the beginning of the universe with
Hubble. This new image from March 2016, is the furthest
look back in time yet. The light from this young galaxy dates to
just 400 million years after the Big Bang. It is surprisingly bright, which means that
galaxies were growing much faster, and much earlier than we ever knew. 25 years after launch, Hubble continues to
amaze. The idea that somebody could be interviewing
me and putting these images up in front of me, and have me comment on 'em, and telling
me that we're in our 25th year of successful science operations... that, that's a mind
blower. In, in NASA, I think Hubble's only second
to the moon landing. I mean, it's that big.
