Airdate: Hubble’s Amazing Rescue
Go behind the scenes on a journey with the astronauts and engineers charged with saving the famous Hubble Space Telescope.
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under Programming
One for the science buffs….
This Sunday night SBS features a doco that looks takes viewers behind the scenes on a journey with the astronauts and engineers charged with saving the famous Hubble Space Telescope.
After nearly 20 years in space, and after capturing hundreds of thousands of spectacular images, the Hubble Space Telescope was dying. Hubble’s gyroscopes and sensors were failing, its batteries were running down, and some of its instruments were already dead. The only hope to save it was a mission so dangerous that NASA had already cancelled it once, in 2004.
It wouldn’t be the first time astronauts had visited Hubble – four previous missions had supplied ‘replacement’ parts. But this time, two of Hubble’s instruments – a camera and a spectrograph – had broken down, and no replacements existed.
However, persistent scientists and the general public alike refused to abandon the telescope, and a new NASA administrator revived the mission. After five exhausting spacewalks, when each of the delicate (previously considered impossible) tasks was completed, Hubble was gently released back into space, now 10-to-70 times more powerful than when it was first launched, and once again a vital scientific resource.
Sunday, 14 August at 9.30pm on SBS ONE.
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2 Responses
Brilliant story. But it was a pity the producers thought every single thing had to be zooming and panning at a zillion fps. We’re adults – we can look at still images some times! This is a really dramatic story – there was no need to make it more dramatic by zooming everything. Made me feel dizzy.
Thanks David, I really enjoy a good science doco.