Telescope Facts

If aliens located 60-65 million light years away from us, looked at earth through a really powerful telescope today, they would see dinosaurs!

On Hubble's last repair mission, astronaut Mike Massimino stripped one screw. It held a handrail blocking a dead instrument behind 111 more screws. The ground team tested a fix and sent up the plan: brute force. So Massimino, who later played himself on The Big Bang Theory, tore the handrail off by hand. The instrument he helped fix still measures starlight.

Hubble launched in 1990 with a $1.5 billion price tag - and a mirror ground to the wrong shape. The error was just 2 microns off, about 1/50th the width of a human hair, but enough to leave the telescope nearly blind. NASA became a late-night punchline. In December 1993, astronauts spent 35 hours across five spacewalks installing corrective optics in orbit. The images that came back were perfect.

NASA built a full-scale twin of the James Webb Space Telescope. They called it the Pathfinder. Engineers froze it to -400 degrees F inside NASA's biggest cryogenic chamber to prove the mirror-support structure would hold its exact shape in deep space's cold. The real Webb launched in 2021. The Pathfinder just went on permanent display at the Smithsonian. It's the closest thing on Earth to the real Webb.